


The Partisan

by nigeltde



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, First Time, M/M, Season 9
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-30
Updated: 2014-07-30
Packaged: 2018-02-11 02:27:26
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 38,638
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2049891
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nigeltde/pseuds/nigeltde
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>AU after 9x10 (Road Trip). Sam returns to the bunker and Dean before he's ready; still, he tries to keep it professional. He fails.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the 2014 SPN J2 Big Bang. Beta'd by the incredible eagle eye of [tfw_ftw](http://archiveofourown.org/users/tfw_ftw) \-- many thanks! Remaining errors are all me. Thanks also to the Wendy of spn_j2_bigbang for her superb ongoing work and the mods of omgspnbigbang for their efforts and enthusiasm.
> 
> I count myself lucky to have caught the eye of [yanyann](http://yanyann.livejournal.com/), who is tremendously talented and an utter delight and who clicked to what I was trying to do right from the start. Her art is below, but please also visit her [art masterpost](http://yanyann.livejournal.com/12909.html) and give her love!

He bruises his shoulder, his hip, and both knees trying to bash, lever or force his way out, and then spends another ten minutes breathing, waiting for the pounding in his head to abate and a solution to occur. The air is thick and cold. He feels like he's fighting through a mist, insubstantial and blinding.

She'd left as he was waking up, jingle of her keys and firm close of the door filtering through to him, but who knew when she'd be back, and what she was planning. Old lady Montrose had taken out the last two of her husbands with an ifrit, and she's had some purpose to putting him in here. 

His spatial awareness keeps turning like he's drunk and he loses track for a second of which way is up, where the door is. His head thumps against the floor of the wardrobe, gash on his scalp opening up again, a wet trickle starting past his ear. His headache worsens.

She'd put something in his drink. Sitting down across the table from him, she'd smiled her old lady smile and drugged his coffee. God knows how she lifted him in here. Maybe he'd climbed in merrily at the merest of her suggestions. 

He pushes again with his knees but there's no room to brace himself. He has no leverage. His hands are bound behind his back and are slowly going numb. 

The most recent police report had a photo of a charred and blackened skeleton smoking in the marital bed. Without cheeks those corpses always seem so mocking. Their lips peeled back, wordless. Fire takes everything you are.

His gorge rises, and he fights it, swallowing hard. He fumbles his phone out of his pocket, yarn around his wrists tightening past the point of pain, and dials by feel. The connection is imperfect.

“Sam?”

“I'm locked in a fucking wardrobe at the Montrose place,” Sam calls down, with no little chagrin. It's been less than two hours since he told Dean he could take care of this by himself and sent him away, cold and impassive, but two hours is a lifetime to the Impala. He could be in another state by now.

“Sammy? Where are you? Can you hear me?”

Real fear wakes and threatens to take wing for the first time since he woke up in this latest coffin. He blinks the blood out of his eyes and breathes deep. He can't smell any smoke. She's not here. He'll be okay.

“The Montrose place,” he yells, and thinks he can hear something crackle through from the other end.

::

Dean pulls him out by his shoulders. He fights it automatically and his heel slips in the pool of his own blood, black and sticky on the linoleum, and he nearly goes down again. Dean steadies him as he sways and cuts the yarn binding his wrists, grip firm and familiar around his forearm. He is close enough for Sam to tip forward and rest, forehead to forehead. Dean would let him.

“Always gotta go and get yourself knocked out,” Dean mutters, hitching an arm around, and Sam shoves him.

“I can walk.”

“Walk, then,” Dean snaps and Sam tries to unbend his bones, get some blood to his extremities, hobbling past the destroyed shrine, past the smouldering body of Old lady Montrose, acrid stench in his nostrils, and out into the night air. She'd lived at the top of the hill in a one-hill town. The whole world would have been able to see him burn up.

He washes himself down at a garden tap, gritting his teeth at the ice water against the cut on his head. It clears his head some, dispels the last of the fog. Taken surprise by an eighty-year-old with a fry pan and a crochet bag. His lip curls in disgust.

Dean is giving him some distance but Sam can feel his gaze, spidering over his skin. Dean is, as always, the bystander to his indignity. Dean has seen him chubby; has seen him fall over his own feet while sneezing; has seen him jerking off; has seen him drink blood; has seen him murder and die. 

Dean has seen just about all of it.

He dries his face on his sleeve.

“Do you know where my car is?”

“It's at the bottom of the hill. Dude, she even slashed your tires.” Dean laughs, impressed, and Sam puts his tongue into his cheek and bites down, and unbends from his crouch, and walks over to the Impala.

::

He grabs his bag out of his car when they pass it, and says yes to some butterfly straps for his forehead, and then he says yes to ibuprofen, and then he says yes to a drink, and then _Back to the Future_ is on. _Back to the Future_ is always, always on. Any television Sam has ever turned on in the last thirty years of his life has wound up here at some point or other.

Dean has kept the bottle for himself, and his refills of Sam's glass get more and more meagre until Sam stands from his rickety chair and grabs the bottle out of his hand and pours himself an actual drink. He regrets it immediately, his arm a heavy drunkweight and obviously not steady as he sets the bottle on the table between them.

“You lost a lot of blood,” Dean says, and holds up his hands when Sam glares at him. “Just saying.”

“Well don't,” he says, and Dean faces him dead on for the first time so far, eyes narrowed and unreadable. He is growing out his stubble. He looks like he hasn't been sleeping.

Good.

Dean blinks and turns away and Sam waits for it, staring at his cheekbone, the regular geometry of his profile, his clenched jaw. His head pounds in time with the DeLorean's engine. He waits for his sorry, his explanation, but Dean is mulish under his gaze. He is readying for a fight. He will never give Sam anything he truly wants without a fight and if Sam expects an apology he will have to wade back into the trenches. 

For the last month he has been punching into the wind. It's been unbalancing to say the least. He expects to see the car outside every motel he drives past; expects to see Dean striding out of every hospital or library, shoulders hunched into his jacket or glad-handing the constabulary. Every bar he walks into he looks first for Dean, by the tables or darts, leaning towards some girl with promises curving his hips. When he hit town and Dean was there, in fact, in flesh, vivid enough to make the month gone a mockery of reality, he almost thought he was hallucinating again.

He should have given up the moment he saw Dean at the sheriff's office. At the very least he would have been spared his attempted trip to Narnia. 

He laughs and drains his glass in a single blow, Dean twitching blurred in his periphery. He refills and leans to push the bottle into Dean's hand, closing Dean's fingers about the neck, pushing them into place with his thumb. His hand is malleable and warm. His knuckles bear scars.

“To the Winchesters,” he says, and throws back another slug, and the room spins, and Dean doesn't raise his bottle, and he doesn't drink.

::

He spends the morning throwing up. Dean fetches him a glass of water and his bag but hangs back for the rest of it, restraining even from mocking him. It's a couple of hours before he can keep any aspirin down and he curses himself, predictably, for drinking, for letting it get the better of him. He should know better. He should be able to handle this like an adult.

His head still throbs inside and out and his stomach muscles nag but he finally manages to stand, and shower, and props himself in the bathroom doorway, as flat and numb as roadkill.

Dean is sitting at the table, face turned to the window. The laptop is open in front of him, coffee cups and the empty bottle beside. Sam looks around his room, at the familiar detritus of a few days' stay, halved. Takeout bags and bottles in the trash. Research on the sideboard and drifted to the floor. Clothes hanging out of his duffel. Never so bad they couldn't run at the drop of a hat; but hardly spotless. 

There are two beds in this room.

“Come on,” Sam says, and rubs at his face. His voice is a rasp, and he can't escape the taste of bile. “Let's go.”

Dean presses his lips together and nods slowly. He shuts the laptop and stands.

“Anywhere I can drop you?” He says, and Sam rolls his eyes. He is too tired for this.

“You know that cave in Kansas with all your stuff in it?”

“It's not a _cave_.”

Sam frowns at him. Dean himself called it the Batcave. What else do you call the inside of a hill? He has seen with his own eyes the cellar, with its barestone walls and cool, even temperature. Like it's a _Famous Five_ novel.

“Lair, at worst.” Dean tries to bluff it out but he's taken aback. He always expects Sam to be on the same wavelength, but Sam has had it with homes. He's zero for three.

“Whatever, Dean. Lair. Bunker. Let's go.”

Dean stares at him a long moment, shadows passing over his face, and Sam remembers that Dean had been the one to walk this time, leaving him and Cas on a bridge with the clouds low and rolling in. His hand tightens on the door jamb. His stomach rises again. He'd have to steal another car; he'd have to drive so far away. He won't be able to. He can barely stand. He's barely alive. 

“Gimme a sec,” Dean says, and starts shoving things into his bag. Dean's face is still strapped down, neutral, but he's relieved, Sam knows it without having to see it. Relieved to have Sam back under his eye. Relieved to win a fixed game, a conman with no confidence. 

All Sam's gear is packed but he pushes himself into the room anyway. He trashes the newspapers. He zips the can of salt into his bag. He brushes past his brother and can smell the sleep on him, the booze, the road, smoke still from last night and it settles in his gut like an occupying force, always already there, a part of him without his permission.

Following the spread of his shoulders out the door his instincts spark and kindle doubt, long dragging foreboding heavy in his chest. It cannot be like it was. His tongue shapes the words in his mouth, and he puts his will to them and tightens his grip on the straps of his bag and tears his eyes from his brother, staring up blindly into the slate-grey cloud.

::

He sleeps on the way back and then sleeps for days, it feels, down in the concrete heart of Kansas; probably only a couple of hours but he loses track of time so fast without any natural light. Waking, he digs at the grit in his eyes and stares up at the copper pipes taking their right turns along the ceiling, stained white-green and last seen fifty years ago. By some hopeless young man with righteous fire burning in him; fear too, maybe, but everything Sam has seen of these Men of Letters has spoken to certainty. How relaxing it must be to live like that.

They had built this place cleverly at least, cementing genius and alchemy into its bones. The pipes still function, as does most of the wiring. Air still circulates, is still filtered somehow. Remarkably little dust had coated the place when they first arrived. 

The room Sam chose is, like much of the bunker, austere, with deco highlights. The floor is bare. His sheets are from the Walmart in Salina; so's his TV. Lucifer would like this room. There's nowhere for Sam to hide in here. His voice would echo off the concrete and tile and follow Sam down the corridors like a cockroach. 

Gadreel must have hated it. Sam doesn't have too many memory gaps in the bunker. Gadreel had probably fled from this room like he had from his cell.

Dean is lurking without lurking. There are cooking noises happening, but the kitchen is too far for any clear sound. Dean wants him out there, so he'll bang on pots; brew coffee; pull his braids. Sam remains stubbornly abed until it seems as much a win for Dean as not, bringing Sam down to his level.

He arms himself with his laptop and heads to the library.

But for a missing lamp the room is just the same as when he last saw it for real, and in Gadreel's dream. Clean. Spotless. Dean, coming in from the north corridor, catches him before he even sits down, stuck four feet in from the door, staring at the step where Kevin died. 

“You okay?” 

Sam can't reply, throat knotted. When he looks for it he can see Kevin's body, laid out and burned out, and other bodies and more than that the feeling of being passenger, the ghostly overlay of Gadreel that Cas had helped him recognise. Usually he can put it away.

“You want something to eat?”

The idea of food churns his gut, and he shakes his head and digs his fingernails into the scars on his palms, the new lifelines that Dean has wrapped for him year by year, nonsense about bedrock foundations.

“I'm, ah. It's good to have you back.”

“Dean,” Sam says, and has no clue what to follow up with. At least one of them is happy.

Dean's mouth twists and his eyes fall past Sam and hit the step by the bookcase, scatter and the momentum turns his body as well, towards the liquor. He keeps his back to Sam as he pours, head bowed. See no evil, hear no evil. 

Sam turns his back too, pulls out a chair and settles himself down. They're well made. They fit him, which is far from typical. He smooths his hand along the table, its glossy varnish. A place of study, of work, far from a hunter's life of cribbed-together vengeance. Two months ago, pulling books down from the shelves like he was back in the Law Library he'd felt capable, centered. It felt like a profession. 

“You don't have to say anything, man. I know. I messed up. That's never gonna go away.”

Sam drums his fingers on the table and looks up, smiles tightly. His brother is propping up the wall, holding the glass against his chest. He is sincerely penitent, Sam can tell, is barely recognisable in it. He is supposed to be the surest thing Sam knows. 

“If you say so, Dean.”

Dean narrows his eyes. 

“Sam, I'm sorry.”

“I know,” Sam says, and opens his laptop. He's sorry too. It's a sorry world.

::

Gadreel has an entry in the Men of Letters' card catalogue, but it's blank. Sam slots it back with a huff of breath that sounds peeved even to his own ears. The Men of Letters had never had to worry about angels, so it stands to reason that they hadn't collected too much angel lore, but it still strikes him as unfair. Henry Winchester had made it sound like the world lay within these walls.

Cas had been more helpful, filling the hours between healings with what he knew of Gadreel and his friends, before the Garden, after the Garden. Gadreel's imprisonment: millennia behind bars, only Abner and his keepers for company. Sam might be inclined to pity if Gadreel hadn't shown his true colours with Kevin, if he hadn't clung to Sam's body so ruthlessly. 

The internet was useful too. After Cas left Sam stayed on a week in the motel alone, pissed off and drunk and reading everything he could find, fundamentalist forums and Biblical exegeses, wasting his time with apocryphal Apocrypha. None of it had sounded like the Gadreel he'd met for five seconds in a dream, the Gadreel whose impression lingered when he sought it out like a sore tooth, the Gadreel who'd spoken to his sole friend so gently before murdering him.

The library has an oversize leather-bound volume of angel and demon hierarchies. Gadreel stands before the Garden, his back turned, wings akimbo, cloth floating discreetly about his person. _The Mistake_ , it's captioned. Hopefully the understatement is a mistranslation.

He flips idly through. Cas barely rates a mention, which makes him smile. This book was written too soon. Cas has done more than any of them. Cas has made choice after choice after choice; Sam doesn't even know how many.

He stops on an engraving of Lucifer in Hell, a crowded Boschian parody. Rays of light explode from behind his head like he's the centre of the world. They always make him so beautiful, or so ridiculously ugly. Never the mundanity of an everyday nightmare, the casual oppression of destiny. 

Whoever put this book together was working from inadequate sources. Sam could make three-word notes in the margins of this thing and blow their minds. He could expand this thing into an encyclopedia.

Sam could write his own Books of Winchester into these books, these elegant and ancient books so different from Chuck's books, from the journal he knows by heart. Sam could trap them in dead pages, write the names of his dead friends, write the structure of the shifted universe. Let some future reader know how Sam has been circling the drain of the apocalypse his whole life, how Sam's brother has saved the world; has saved Sam, and ruined him tenfold.

::

“Hey man, find anything?”

Sam starts. He'd been dozing, head propped on hand, and he blinks himself aware as Dean emerges, circles around the library table. Sam spins his laptop, and Dean bends down, reaching out for the trackpad, bracing himself on the back of a chair. Sam has the overhead lights going and they cast unpleasant shadows on his brother's face, hollow him out, take the spark out of his eyes. 

“Nothing,” Dean confirms.

“Nada.”

It's four in the morning. He's fallen asleep at the wheel after spending the rest of the day patrolling the internet: setting up monitoring on his usual pagers and radars and news feeds, names of Gadreel's associates and enemies and other key words; following a spike of crime in Texas ascribed to Satanism through to its banal conclusion; chasing down a scrap of an idea about using pressure gradients to track mass angel appearances. Nothing promising.

Dean groans and straightens, cracks his back. He looks around.

“We should get some beanbags or something. You can't be comfortable.” 

Sam shrugs. It's nothing new and Dean knows it, frustration hitting his face as he heads over to the alcohol again and pulls a bottle of Jack, reaching inside his jacket for the familiar flask. 

“You gonna get some proper sleep anytime soon?” He says, and Sam eyes the flask in his hand, eyebrow raised. Dean spins the lid closed, makes a big show of putting it back in his pocket, and then fixes himself a glass as well. He carries it just like Dad did, little finger crooked underneath the base. 

“Peachy, the silent treatment,” he mutters, walking along the table, flipping pages in the books Sam's left out, losing Sam's place. Sam snatches the book from under his fingers and turns it back to the chapter he's been translating. _Paradisus Domini_. If he never has to read about the sin of Eve again he'd be happy. If he could escape the Garden as a whole.

“What do you want me to say, Dean?” It comes out snippy and childish and he presses his lips together firmly. If Dean would just leave him alone long enough to find some equilibrium he could make this work, he knows he could.

“Say whatever you want. Cuss me out. Tell me what a fuckup I am. Just--” Dean breaks off, takes a drink. It's not the talking, though. Sam could never talk again and Dean wouldn't care so long as he was there, mirror and prop.

“I'm here aren't I?” 

“If you wanna call it that,” Dean mutters down at the books. 

So unfair, it hits him like a sucker punch and he finds himself on his feet, gritting his teeth, jabbing his finger down onto the table.

“Don't you dare be pissed at me for coming _back_.”

“That's not what I--” Dean shakes his head, frustrated, puts his drink on the table with a rattle like bones. “Look Sam, Kevin, Gadreel, that's on me. I know that every minute of every day.” His voice is torn and degraded, and he steps forward and Sam could get his hands on Dean's throat, he could silence the rest of it, he could burn out Dean's eyes. “But you were _dying_.” Dean spreads his hands, perplexed, wordless.

_You'd do it again_ , Sam thinks, and flees before Dean can do anything to confirm it.

Bursting outside the bunker he paces and shakes out his arms and heaves in the dark, muggy air. The stars are barely visible. Under the hill it's a constant cool temperature but this week the sun, low and merciless, has baked the ground into a kiln. The heat is still trapped under the trees, beats out from the rock and sweat starts down his back, forehead, anywhere his skin folds. He's never done well with the heat. The cold at least you can protect yourself against.

When he was a kid they'd stayed in New Mexico for a couple of months. He'd been so angry, all the time, battered about the head and neck by the sun, his cheeks and nose always tingling with burn. The air was so thick he could barely suck it down. 

Fourteen, outside of Farmington, running full tilt down a back-road, the dust behind him kicked up not by his own feet but by the Impala as Dean drove it away. _I need to study_ , he'd said. _Just go, Dean, go on your stupid gross date_ , and Dean had said something dumb, _it's only gross if you do it right Sammy_ , cock-of-the-walk, flaunting it.

He'd stretched himself getting back, straining his tendons and shoulders and lungs, sprinting along in fuming consuming hate, that Dean would want that hookup so much, that he would believe Sam was okay, and just go for all that, taking the car, taking his voice, his sound, his suffocating presence.

At the distant weatherboard house they were squatting in he was beige with dust and so soon was the bathroom sink. In the mirror was a child with tracks on his face that could be tears or sweat, he didn't want to know which. He did know that Dean would come home within an hour of dusk falling. He did know that he needed to finish his paper, that it would be even easier without Dean scruffing about the place, farting, chewing, making sexist jokes. 

He always remembers Farmington wrong, though; they wouldn't have had the Impala back then. Dad took it from them, over and again, stranding them until Dean scared up a replacement from places Sam was better off not knowing about. Then Dad would return and wrap them in it, in those stifled endless drives with one or the other of them needling him constantly, spilling out into a too-small motel room or rundown dead-eyed house that was too big. Then so soon again staring out at the tail-lights as they disappeared, Dean's hand on his shoulder.

Growing older he had shrugged off the hand, turned his own back and refused to watch Dad leave, but still the door-latch clicking shut found him wherever he was, lying in bed or studying on the couch or forcing down a PB&J as Dean frowned at him across the kitchen, brows drawn down and lower lip pouting in dismay, or whatever it was that went through Dean's mind when Sam expressed a desire to have a living, present father.

Stubborn shit, he was, was their opinion. Could never just put himself aside; so easy for Dean to do it, always relocating himself six feet to the left of any instinct of self-preservation. But Sam was already bending, and bending, twisting himself into sideshow rarities and still they asked for more. 

Sam is straight-backed now and grown, in a house somewhat of his own choosing. They'll never be what they were and it feels like a loss but he takes comfort from it anyway. Running from Dean that time in Farmington he had hated himself for his neediness, that desperate clinging clawing feeling he got when Dean left, imagining Dean's relief at being free of his boring little brother. 

Sam laughs dully, kicks at some pebbles. If Dean ever sought freedom he's given up on it now. And maybe Sam will never be able to leave either, but at least he can keep himself sane. He can wear a bland dispassionate air like a suit. He can act like a fucking professional, even if his brother can't, and they can work as they've been taught to work, clean and certain and sure.

::

“I've found a job,” he says, running a hand through his hair, pleased with the evenness of his tone. He's brought the files into the garage, where Dean has been fiddling all morning. Dean extracts his head from the guts of the Impala, rests a forearm on the cylinder block and squints up at him.

“Metatron or Gadreel?”

“Something else, I think.”

“Abbadon? Crowley?”

“Neither Heaven nor Hell, Horatio,” Sam says, and quirks an eyebrow at Dean, but Dean's not amused. He sighs and stands, pulling a rag from his pocket, wiping his hands, sleeves rolled past his elbows like a poster in a retro diner, muscles flexing. He frowns. 

“Aren't those guys step one?”

“I've been looking. There's nothing.”

Dean shrugs. He still hasn't shaved, and he still won't look directly at Sam, staring down at his hands, drawing the rag through them. 

“Don't you want a bit of a break, though? After everything?”

“What are you gonna do, chain me to the bed?” Sam snaps, bristling and Dean's eyes flick up, startled and hot with recognition. He would, if he thought he had to. He's done it before.

“Jesus, Sam, I'm just asking. It's only been a couple of days.”

Sam pinches the bridge of his nose, rubs at the corners of his eyes. He's put this together after about four hours' sleep and he should have waited until tomorrow. Gotten more rest, let Dean settle. But his bones ache at the thought of another day in here, and his last hunt was a disaster and all he's done since then is linger and corrode, his thoughts running endless black-hearted circuits.

“Salt and burn,” he says, pleasantly. “It'll be easy, Dean, come on. I can't, we can't just sit around. I can't.”

Dean eyes him and purses his lips, considering. He comes around to the idea as Sam watches, nodding firmly and tucking the rag back in his pocket.

“Yeah. Yeah, all right. Let's put one in the win column,” he says, and bends back into the engine, and Sam turns and leaves him, thinking of nothing, trailing the tips of his fingers along the gleaming hoods of the cars, the cool dark band of tiles lining the corridors, step by step back to his room.

::

They need gas money, and bribe money, and food money, and they stop at a bar in Decateur.

It's a shitbox, mostly, ash on the floor, grime on the bar. Sam doesn't want to think about the toilets. Lined up by the jukebox are three non-regulation tables, and Sam pops a quarter in and pages through the song selections, eyes sidelong. A fair few people here tonight, but only a few that look likely. One guy in particular. 

“Bowie? Seriously? You trying to punish me?” Dean says, when he gets back to the bar. Sam rolls his eyes. 

“Middle table,” he says. “Bachelor party or birthday.”

“You wanna be the tough?” 

“Nah, straight sandbag,” he says, and doesn't mean it to hit but Dean, who always wants it them against the world, who wants to speak to Sam in secret codes, takes it like a hit, folding in on himself. But he recovers in an instant, and signals for two more beers each, and dangling them loosely and with easy tipsy smiles they head over.

Sam goes in trying not to let the atmosphere affect him, trying to keep an open mind, and immediately dislikes the mark; he's tall, taller than Dean, and a few years younger, and well-muscled in a gym-bound sort of way. Nice guy on a nice night out, and a good player, joking with his friends as he demolishes them. He's happy to cede the table to Sam and Dean but Dean insists he play Sam, that jocular grin on his face, hey buddy-buddy, and lays a five down that he'll be playing next. The guy, Scott, caught in Dean's dazzle, won't take the money when Sam loses.

Dean, beer in each hand, puts down another ten like he'd prefer to be hanging with Riley and Thad instead of playing pool with his lame kid brother, but Riley and Thad get more interested in the game when Sam wins this time, and the next, and misses the next two by a hair's breadth. Sam fixes a look of friendly regret on his face and taps his beer against Scott's and drinks, and Dean is telling him to slow down, laughing and telling Scott to stop taking advantage, and Sam is too stone-cold sober for this.

Dean is working them even though Sam told him not to, hovering always at the edges of Sam's focus, pushing the mood to the limit of Sam's ability to grin and fake it but grin and fake it Sam does, and after thirty minutes Sam and Dean walk with all their cash. Dean even shakes their hands, apologetic, and they refuse to let him forgive the debt, their new friends Sam and Dean, good guys. 

Safer this way, but crueller and more draining, and Sam steals an unattended Corona on the way out and sucks it down in the car, washing away a sick slant to his guts thinking of those regular guys who might have been his Stanford friends and Dean in amongst them like a mantis, rips in his jeans and a look in his eyes like he's been waiting just for you. Bottle empty he lowers his hand and Dean is watching him, eyes dark and far from the road, and slow starlight smile crosses his face, pinning Sam, making his heart stagger.

“Taught you well Sammy,” he says, gruffly, and finally turns back to the road, puts his eyes where they should be, and Sam, mouth dry and overcome, wants to snap back that his skill is his own, is no credit to Dean, but behind him lie countless hours in bars that didn't care that he was a particularly baby-faced twenty-one year-old, entire nights of Dean's patient and mocking guidance, bent over a pool table, learning how to pocket bank shots from the odd end of the table, how to play drunk, how to fake luck, good and bad.

“Don't you think we're a little old for that kid-brother bullshit?” He says instead, and watches Dean's expression freeze. He lets his head fall against the window but the impact isn't enough to shock him, pull him out from under the cowl settling around his shoulders, this easy Sunday drive down the backroads of his youthful clamouring: Dean leave me alone, Dean can you fix it, Dean eff off, Dean get me a Snickers, Dean check this out, Dean I can do it myself, Dean, Dean, Dean.

::

Sam flies his hand out the window, on the breeze they create by their own passing, in time with the nodding crops. They've been driving for an hour now, most of it along the I-74, and the soy at this time of year rustles dead and brown. Dean hates having the window open even at these slower speeds coming out of a township but honestly. Fuck him. The car is hot and stuffy. Their clothes are stale. Sam had intended to take their shit to the laundromat last night but he'd been so tired after the bar, had crashed immediately and woke this morning only with great effort.

By the look of him Dean barely slept at all. He had stabbed at the cassette player immediately when they got in the car, shoving Motorhead in, always a flag for his temper turning grim and intractable. Hostage again to Dean's moods in this car which is big enough to loom like a vampire on small-town streets, nearly big enough to sleep comfortably in; small enough that sometimes he can't breathe in here, and inaction boils in his limbs, acute enough to cramp.

Field after field after field.

They could take the car through these fences like a tornado, making crop circles, carving runes into the season. But they stay on the road. He knows exactly where it leads: duck under Indianapolis, hit up that diner Dean loves east of Clayton, and then the long way around Columbus because Dean struck out with a girl there once and he blames the city as a whole.

His hand hurts, and he looks down to see he's white-knuckling it, fists clenched on his thighs. He's breathing too fast, lightheaded, and he has nothing left, he is totally emptied out.

“Pull over,” he grates.

“Already? You went before we left.” 

“Dean, pull over,” he says, too loud, panic bouncing around the car, and Dean finally catches on, hauling on the wheel and crunching to a stop. Sam bashes the door open and throws himself out of there, vision blurred, stumbles getting out and fetches up against a slim fence-post. He rests his forehead against the back of his hand and flattens his other hand against his diaphragm, a deep creaking push that lets his lungs know they are working, that he is breathing, that he is alive. 

His jaw-muscles ache. His head pounds, and he wipes at his nose and starts walking, ignoring Dean's shout behind him, the low-rev growl of the Impala as it trails him. He shoves his hands in his jacket and stretches his legs out, tramping the fresh roadside ragweed underfoot, imagines it bending itself back to normal behind him, never a sign that he ever existed, that he trod here, he and his blood and his fallen angels, he and his brother, who knows his goddamn bathroom habits.

It had taken six months before Jess would use the bathroom with the door open. Amelia too. Amelia was one of three kids in a small house and took her privacy where she could get it. She had told him so one night after coming home to him taking piss, leaning back to watch the TV through the bathroom doorway. She had also chewed him out for making a mess, but it was just a few drops. They had laughed as she threw a roll of paper towel at his head.

After Dean was raised from Hell he started shutting the door while he was in the bathroom. He never had before, as a kid, as a teen. Never a time when Dean wasn't there, forcing his presence. Comments about odour, about jerking off. When Sam is in the right mind he finds his brother funny.

Sam is rarely in his right mind these days. The core of him is wire-thin now, whittled away over the years to nothing. He can't cope alone. He can't handle the bunker. Can't handle the Impala. Forty-eight hours, and all his supposed composure is slipping through his hands like water. It has to be close to a record. 

A lorry blasts by them, sounding its horn mockingly, and he slows. He must look ridiculous, stalking down the road, the car a bad smell behind him, like some petty lover's spat. He drops his head, and turns, and when the Impala draws up sets his hands on the roof and leans down as she draws level.

Dean stretches and ducks to see him, is impassive, wrist balanced on the wheel. His skin is clear and pale against the threat of stubble and he has the flinty eyes of a jailer. He does not try to pull an explanation out of Sam, as he would have a decade ago.

To Sam's left the road is empty and the fence and fields run on forever. To his right the road is empty and the fence and fields run on forever. He would disappear in all that space.

He gets back in.

::

In Philly at last, they squat brazenly in a dumpy grey apartment building, taking a room on the ground floor. It has one window, which looks out onto the rear wall of a pawn shop. Sam hates it. To their left a young couple bang all the time, and then scream at each other. Sometimes they scream, and then bang. To their right is an old man who mutters constantly, tries to open everyone's letterboxes, and tells them outrageous, literally unbelievable gossip about everyone in the building.

Across the hall are a trio, mom-dad-teen, and three doors down is a room that two years ago housed a handgun suicide, and a month ago a double homicide in a locked-room mystery. The husband was put away for it, but Mr Jimenez saw the aftermath and swears there were Satanic rituals involved, the wife and her boyfriend cut up in decidedly Godless ways.

The guy who lives there now, Brister, middle-aged and single, is already spooked by the room's history and nearly catches them casing his apartment the next afternoon. Sam pushes Dean out of the window only just in time. Huddled under the windowsill, in a bed of weeds, listening intently to Brister dump his keys on the table and bitch about his boss on the phone, Dean looks utterly ridiculous, splattered in mud, dandelion seeds glued to his face like a cheap inner-city Oberon. Sam bites his lip and picks a seed from his cheek, and Dean pulls back like his touch is poison, glares at him and wipes at himself, lashes out lightening-quick to dirty Sam's face and Sam slaps at his hand, dark and angry.

There's nothing to the room itself and Sam escapes to the library for a couple of hours to research the suicide, leaving Dean to the grey walls and Mr Jimenez's weak tea and gossip. As the day darkens the whole building's shutters bash and clang, and slick ice appears in the hallway without source and brings down Mrs Ryan with a heavy thud. She's a big woman and Sam struggles to help her to her feet with the ice underfoot. In her eyes he recognises something, that end-of-the-line weariness, that disbelief that there is more to deal with this day, but she is grateful for his help, and her daughter blushes when he smiles at her as they bend to gather spilt groceries. 

He walks them back to their home, across from where he and his brother are squatting, and sees them inside with a warm strong feeling spreading in his chest. It's been so long since he's been of use, and as he crosses the hall a rhythm hints at him, some future efficient ebb and flow of work. The easy routine of it is comforting and it might not be so bad, Sam thinks, to be a person who does this. It could be a liveable life, and he surprises himself into a good mood, nodding a greeting at Dean, wiping down the room, working neatly around him as he finishes packing.

They salt and burn the suicide, a bitter and angry man who became a bitter and angry spirit, and leave without farewell, slingshotting around Norristown and stopping for beer fifty miles down the road. Sam cleanses the taste of ash from his mouth and picks at the splinters in his hand, long shallow graze of them pressing dully on his nerves, casualty of a cheap casket and shovel handle slippery in the lightly-spitting rain. The guy had been rotten through and Sam had only just managed to avoid landing in him when he lost his balance.

Three beers in the noise of the bar dims somewhat and he glances up to the TV, to the report of the block of flats that had only just burned down in the city, and the three dead people, a man on the ground floor and a couple above him, trapped and dead. The screen shows their building nearly gutted, black and steaming amid the chaos of emergency services and news. Mr Jimenez is being interviewed, shaken and sunken, his combover flapping like he's been scalped.

Sam stands, slowly, stomach bottoming out, clammy and feverish. Something he had missed, in the papers, in Brister's apartment, and he had just left them to it, Mrs Ryan and her daughter, all of them. Maybe he had even made it worse, poking around, indiscriminate and careless. Three hours this has been lying in wait for him, three whole hours since he left them thinking he was safe from his failures for one more night. 

There is pressure on his arm, and he looks down to see Dean's fingers locked into his sleeve, tugging gently. 

“Whatever was keeping it there, it's gone now,” Dean says, and Sam puts his face in his hands, erasing his brother's soft ignorant sympathy, blocking all of them out, their ghoulish muttering and the guilty laugh of someone in the back who's already cracking a joke at the expense of Mr Jimenez, whose life just burned to ash, wild in the face of the void.

He lets Dean pull him down, and orders a drink, and another. It's on purpose; he's not gonna lie to himself. He drinks vodka, reliably effective, and now, time-shifted, lurking in the dark on the hood of the car, watching Dean pay for their room he welcomes the haze of determination it gives him, the specificity of focus. Dean, spotlit by the dim night downlights, turns and leans on the counter to check on him. His brows cast shadows over his eyes like a mask and Sam bites the inside of his lip until he tastes blood and waits for it, rattlesnake-ready. That's the joy of Dean. He always comes up with something.

Their room is at the end of the block, and he lets Dean drive down ahead of him, walking instead across the lot, rolling his shoulders and cracking his neck, swollen with injustice and futility like a dying star. He trips heading inside because Dean, fucking Dean has left the door open, faint lamplight slanting out and obscuring the step up, and it catches his toe and he scrapes his grazed hand afresh on the wall, trying to right himself. 

“Jesus, you're a lightweight,” Dean says, frowning at him from over by the beds, emptying his pockets on to the bedside tables. “How many times have I told you, man. Drink girly drinks, get girly drunk.”

Sam swears under his breath and works at his hand, clenching and unclenching, pain vibrating, feeling his blood rise. Five hours ago he wrenched something in his back punching a shovel through rotting wood. Five days ago he got powdered salt in his eye, refilling the shotgun shells. Five years ago he fell into the ground and Lucifer embraced him. 

“I know you had your heart set on this one but we can't win them all, Sam,” Dean buzzes in his ear. “Sam. Sammy.”

He turns and stares at Dean. Sammy, always Sammy. Still. He's gone to Hell or close enough and he's killed beyond count and there are two women he might have married one day if his life weren't his life and still it's Sammy. He feels himself begin to tilt, looking at Dean, lodestar with his fucking worry and his roughshod big-brother boots, and his face heats with a crazy carnival anger, heart pushed into overdrive. 

Dean eyes him, doubtful, and his lips part and close again, biting back the words. He doesn't need to say them out loud. Sam can hear his voice. _Are you okay. Are you okay Sammy,_ when he already knows the answer. He only ever asks it to hear what he wants to hear. But Sam is not okay. Sam is done. Sam is a wasteland, and he is not going to listen to any more of his brother's razorwire demands ever again. 

“C'mon, time to sleep it off. Remember what happened last time.”

“Shut up,” he says, low. He is still staring at Dean, and it makes Dean uneasy, shifting back onto his heels. He must look like a madman. He feels like one. He flexes his hand again, shaking out the sting, and kicks a leg behind him at the door. It slams like a gunshot.

“Fine, pass out on the floor. I don't care.”

“You're a goddamn liar, Dean,” Sam says, and draws himself up to his full height and steps towards him. Dean's eyes widen and something flashes across his face that Sam has seen before, corner-of-the-eye glimpses, but never caught, never been able to touch.

“Sam,” he warns, and holds up a hand but Sam walks right into it, puts his chest to Dean's palm and leans a little weight and stays there. They are close, and he can feel Dean's fingertips press and flex against his shirt, and he's on fire, finally, flames roaring in his ears, Old lady Montrose's dream come true. He drops his gaze to Dean's mouth and Dean licks his lips, and when he looks up Dean's eyes are blown dark, some internal ferment of control and flight and bleak and bottomless want, he knew it, he knew it, he knew it. 

He smiles. It feels like a nasty smile.

“You know what I think?”

He pushes in, gets his leg between Dean's, steady, and Dean's mouth drops open in a shocked, shuddering gasp. Under his thigh he can feel Dean's dick filling, and he turns his hips and presses in again, puts his hand to Dean's neck in a friendly brotherly pat, thumb against his pulse. Dean's heart is beating like he's in freefall, and his throat works under Sam's palm.

“I think you do care,” he says, draws it out, soft and slow in Dean's ear, and Dean shudders again, full-body tremble that opens him up a little, parts his thighs a little and wonder of wonders Sam can press in even closer, trapping Dean's hand between their chests. Dean makes a bit-off grunt of arousal, soft but they're so close it's like he made it himself and Dean is here, right here under his hand, he could do anything, they could do anything at all and it wrecks him like a ship on the rocks, all souls lost. He's hard himself, he realises, aghast, hard to the point of aching and dizzy with it, it happened so fast. 

What has he done. This wasn't what he meant. He closes his eyes and stills and barely has the capacity to damn himself, letting drink get the best of him, letting Dean get the best of him, forgetting that they are real, forgetting that this is all he has. He swallows, swamped by heart-attack despair and shock. What has he done. 

“Fuck you, Sam,” whispers Dean, lips brushing the edge of his jaw and Sam is gone, bombarded by it, just that feather-light touch, and then Dean rolls his hips and takes Sam's earlobe in his teeth.

They hit the wall. His thumb has tilted Dean's chin up and he is sucking at the tender skin of Dean's neck and Dean is pushing into him and swearing, curse words like a prayer, crazy and lost with a mouthful of Sam's hair, his arms coming around Sam like iron bands. 

The strength of him. 

Sam grinds his forehead into Dean's and goes for his belt. Dean rears back and kisses Sam, hot and biting and Sam, open-mouthed and ready for it, abandons Dean's jeans to push the jacket and shirt off his shoulders, gets his hands on the cotton, underneath, running his fingers across the grooves and planes of muscle there always hidden from him. His skin is smooth and interrupted by scars, his sparse chest hair. He thumbs a nipple and Dean grunts into his mouth and drops his hands to Sam's ass and pulls but Sam cannot get any closer, Sam is as close as it is possible to get. 

He tries though, dropping his own jeans and pushing at Dean's, tangled around their boots, and when he finally gets them skin to skin he lifts his palm to Dean's mouth and Dean, seeing it, makes a high, helpless noise, screws his eyes shut and licks Sam's palm, a wide wet rasp that hits Sam like an avalanche, pulverising, disintegrating, and he claims Dean's mouth again and wraps his hand around them both, fingers clumsy and stretching to bring them together, palm slipping against Dean, skin there silky and tight. When he fucks his hips up the head of his dick skids along Dean's stomach and he comes, swallowed by the heat of Dean's mouth, the heat of them together as Dean sucks his tongue and grabs him everywhere he can reach, both hands locked on Sam's head when he comes in turn, fingers closing painfully in Sam's hair.

They pant at each other a while, hot and damp. Sam is dizzy again. His hair clings to his forehead, his cheek; a matching sheen of sweat shines Dean's face. He wipes his hand on the bottom of his shirt. Dean's eyes are still closed. He looks shattered, lashes dark against the bruised skin under his eyes. His lips are wet, and swollen, and parted. He is remarkable. He is the most remarkable thing Sam has ever known. He is the most remarkable thing Sam will ever know, and coming down from this Sam takes the thought in his teeth and grits them and pushes up away from the wall.


	2. Chapter 2

In the morning Dean is still there. It is unexpected.

Sam, lying on his stomach, head turned to face the room, refuses to open his eyes. He puts a knuckle to his temple and pushes there, feeling that slight internal give. His hangover, minor to begin with, abates. He is curiously empty. 

Dean is moving around, not bothering to be quiet, and when Sam finally looks he sees his brother stuffing clothes into his duffel. He picks up his jacket and shirt from where they lie in a puddle by the wall without flinching, and zips his bag firmly. His face is fixed, smoothed out, anger under there locked down tight enough to make Sam wary. He props himself up on an elbow, just in case, and the movement gets Dean's attention. 

“I'll see you at home,” he says. Sam raises his eyebrows and Dean sucks in an appalled breath through his teeth. Eyes narrowed, he shakes his head so minutely he might not even realise he's doing it. 

Sam waits him out. He has nothing more to say.

But Dean is out of words too, turns and slings the duffel over his shoulder in an easy move and leaves, shutting the door firmly. Seconds later the car door opens and shuts; seconds after that it opens and slams, a monstrous wretched crash that fractures the room, and then again, even louder; and then a fourth time. _Did that help, Dean?_ He wants to ask, but Dean can't answer: the car is already gone.

::

He goes back to Philly, just to make sure. The police are fixed on arson, following reports of two strange men who had been loitering in the building for a couple of days before the fire. The sketch of Dean from their neighbour's description is mockingly bad, malformed and unrecognisable. Mr Jimenez needs to get his eyes checked.

The apartment block is stained and broken-eyed, slated for destruction the day after he gets there, too much structural damage. He goes in at midnight, flitting past the lone guard, ducking under the tape. Brister's room is clearly the centre of it, the fire reaching here down through the floorboards and into the foundations, reaching up to take out the ceiling too, and the people who lived there. The place stinks, except for here, in this cup hollowed into the concrete. 

He remembers the crime scene photos of the suicide, sprawled dead in this spot. Blood, maybe, keeping the spirit here, seeping into the ground. Burned away now.

The building groans, lamenting, and he stands, clicking off his flashlight.

::

There is a cat asleep on the doorstep of Amelia's house, a large nondescript tabby.

 _Don's,_ he thinks resentfully. Amelia hates them. In her past are a series of mercurial turncoat cats. She hates their unpredictability. She hates their litter boxes. She hates her clients' fat and sharp and loud darlings.

The Honda he stole is a dirty but glaring yellow and he has not bothered to hide it. Fifteen minutes. Fifteen minutes, and if he's not caught out, he'll go.

Everything is so green, here, in a false, heightened way. The lawns at Stanford had been the same, like someone had washed over the scene with Photoshop. But he has been in plenty of suburbs, plenty of college towns. It's not the grass that is different. 

He remembers arriving at Stanford for the first time, the campus opening up before him like a book, and seeing those buildings in their permanence and import, seeing those easy laughing boys tossing frisbees, older than him and looking years younger, he had been glad that Dean wasn't there, that he didn't have to negotiate Dean's place in this world. And he had missed him with a solid knot of worry and guilt that barely abated over four years, putting a constant lie to his spacious and easy life, the truths he told his girlfriend, his so-called friends, himself. 

He waits another twenty. A neighbour comes home and unloads his groceries. The cat doesn't move. 

Don isn't going anywhere. Sam left. Twice, in fact. He has no claim that either Amelia or Don would recognise. What little in his life he has claim to he has just sabotaged as neatly as anything ever has been, razing and salting the land with impunity. 

He pulls out into the road. 

Third time's the charm.

::

Dean is in the kitchen when he gets there, and emerges through the archway to the war room with a gun half-raised in one hand, a wooden spoon in the other. Sauce hits the floor in vivid blood splatters.

Sam freezes, up on the landing like a thief under lights. Dean's face is in shadow and Sam looks down at his shape, familiar as the sky. He knows him now. All of him, and the parts he shouldn't know are just the last crumbs of a lifetime of too much, too close, his brother always first and foremost, the frame through which the rest of the world appeared.

He wonders if Dean had doubted him. Of course he was going to come back. It seems Sam will cuff himself to his brother as often as the universe will allow it, whatever Dean does to him, whatever he does to Dean. Around and around like a death echo.

“Hungry?” asks Dean, after a while. His voice sounds rusty. Sam nods and descends, iron creaking underfoot.

::

Out in the wind, free and easy and unpursued, are three creatures due a reckoning. Gadreel especially, who will forever have Kevin's name against him. He works it alone, settling back at his laptop with a sigh, trying to track deaths and disappearances across an entire country. It's impossible.

Dean is still pissed, and they are not talking about what happened, and Sam gets that, he does, he is just as eager to let it lie, forgotten and unrepeated, dissolved into the general white noise of everything else they don't talk about: Dad, blood, betrayal. But he can't do it alone, pretending everything's the same when Dean is never around, slipping from between his fingers the harder he tries, staying up late and waking late, then switching when Sam tries to match him. He's busy whenever Sam needs to talk to him: on the phone to Cas or polishing all the cars, breaking down the guns or on his way into town to stock up on ammo and booze and toilet paper. 

He feels himself slip and needle, his patience ebb to a permanent low tide. He tries for his best self, his most open and even self, and finds always his worst self, guilt shifting to irritation, irritation to anger. Change it, he tells himself, and tries to recover his distance, his reason. He runs every day, and keeps humane hours, and finds neutral and civil conversation, but just the sight of Dean's face, or more often his shoulders curved away, his back fading down stairs or around corners, flares his temper, makes him grit his teeth. 

They eat separately too, or at least he guesses Dean eats. He doesn't see it. He sees the drinking, though, a tactical mistake on Dean's part, and that's where Sam corners him.

“Dean, we gotta make this work,” he says, steady and honest, and shuts the cabinet, and Dean snatches his hand back with a curse, glaring like Sam had actually caught his fingers in the door. Sam finally gets a good look at him, half afraid he might have transformed in Sam's absence, a drunkard's capillary starburst across his cheeks maybe, or a scar from nowhere, but he is the same dire straits Dean, exhausted and dully desperate, eyes flicking to the exits, voice ground down to shards.

“Christ, Sam, take a hint.”

“Dean,” he says, a helpless whine threading through it that makes him sick. He swallows hard.

Dean purses his lips and nods, and explodes, pitching his flask at the wall, setting two hands to Sam's chest and shoving hard. 

“Hey,” Sam shouts, more startled than anything, but Dean is stalking forward, murderous, jabbing his finger into Sam's chest.

“You wanna talk it out? Let's talk it out: don't you _ever_ do that again. I don't care how much you hate me. Never again. Promise.”

Sam sneers, hackles rising. There's an _or else_ floating in there somewhere, like Dean has been expecting Sam to jump him this whole time when _he_ is the one who never wanted this, _he_ is the one who has had to leave, over and over, _he_ is the goddamn Winchester pariah for needing the space Dean refuses to give him without a civil fucking war. He could ask Dean to make him the same promise about all the borderlines he's crossed with impunity. He could walk in again and show Dean exactly the limits of his threats.

“Dean, of course--” 

Dean snarls and shoves him again, but Sam, braced against the table, has nowhere to go, and Dean's hands in his jacket clutch or push or both at once. He is terrified, Sam realises. He is drowning in it.

“You've got no idea, Sam. Shut _up_. Promise me.”

Sam opens his hands and spreads them wide. 

“Sure, I promise,” he says, and something relaxes behind Dean's eyes and he breathes out, long and low, passes a hand over his face, stretching and moulding the skin.

“Okay. Okay, that's it.”

He opens the cabinet again and pulls a bottle and sidesteps around Sam. Sam watches him pick up the flask with an arthritic sigh and leave, and he's swallowing it, Sam can tell, this acquiescence he extracts from Sam like fool's gold. If it helps him to think Sam is deranged enough to touch him again, well, whatever lets him sleep at night. He'll get over it. He always does; he's gotten over worse, and it's not that bad. Sam has swallowed it away already, the blistering shock of Dean's body in the moment, the weight of his dick, the heat of his mouth. 

He would have fucked Dean when he was soulless. This is something he remembers briefly, very briefly, every now and then, with a queasy lingering repulsion. He'd even made a play, a week or so after Dean had found out why exactly Sammy didn't feel like Sammy, when he'd seemed tired and hopeless enough to succumb. He'd given Dean some line about release or relaxation, out at a bar, standing too close, backs of their hands brushing, and would have pushed beyond Dean's startled retreat if he'd thought it worth the effort. But sex was cheap in those days, and worthwhile hunting partners expensive, and he had assumed at the time that sex would be the end of it. 

Apparently he had underestimated them both.

When he remembers that time he pictures Dean as a matryoshka doll, his interior so accessible and hollow; he remembers the scorn he was always hiding at Dean, so vulnerable, and can sometimes even summon it back like armour on the bad days that follow dreams of the cage, Kevin, Dad. Days when Dean looks at him like he owns him, and the scorn reflects and he despairs of himself, his weakness, his inability to be fully and finally free. 

When he was soulless, and he had wanted Dean in that offhand considering way and he hadn't even cared at the stain it left in him. When he was soulless, and the space in him reserved for Dean had been nothing but an index card, a long and meaningless list of concepts and feelings, and he had not been himself at all.

::

In the morning, as he does every morning, Sam goes through his alerts and logs at the kitchen table. He finds a couple of potential hunts. Nothing ever turns up on the angels or demons, but it's habit now, and it keeps him occupied as Dean comes in, starts banging on the coffee machine.

He waves a cup in Sam's periphery.

“Thanks,” Sam says, unable to keep the surprise out of his voice. He hesitates. “Found a possible shifter in Jacksonville.”

Dean grimaces.

“My favourite.”

“City?”

“Sure,” says Dean, and gifts him with a minor smile, and Sam feels his own lips twitching in response. He leans back to accept his coffee, and watches Dean perch on the bench, legs dangling, sticking his nose in his own mug with a happy sigh. He has nightmares every night now from what Sam can detect, the echoes of a moan or call down the hall, shadows under his eyes in the morning, a certain spaciness. 

Dean loves this place. When Sam washes his dishes he leaves them next to the sink to finish drying and Dean has to follow along behind and put them away. He fetches coasters out of thin air, and bitches Sam out for leaving rings on tables and shelves and the armrests of chairs. Sam doesn't understand. It's nice, and useful, he'll grant; but it's still basically a motel with a bunch of extra rooms and a good shower. Same as it always has been. Same as it always will be. Still, a leaden guilt settles in his chest, the recklessness with which he threatened this for his brother. Dean needs this. He should have been kinder. He should have been different.

“Dean,” he says, and stops, unsure how to go on. So many sentences in his life begin with that word, but he can never hit upon the right one when it counts.

His first mouthful of coffee chokes him, disgusting with salt. He coughs, spraying it on himself, and runs to the sink, gagging.

Dean guffaws. 

“Salt? Really?” Sam splutters, scraping at his tongue, pushing water around his mouth. “Real mature.”

“Come on, it's a joke.” Dean grins. “Lighten up.” 

“You lighten up,” he spits uselessly, and storms out of the kitchen, impotent and petulant, his laptop left behind and no way to go back for it. 

“I'm plenty light!” Dean calls down the hall behind him. His cheeks burn. He pulls a bottle of water out of the bar fridge and fumes in his room the rest of the morning, rinsing the taste out of his mouth and crunching mints and turning over retaliatory tactics. This is not the first time Dean has switched out salt and sugar. As kids it deserved nothing less than itching powder.

As kids.

Sam collapses on the bed and puts his head in his hands, takes stock of his hard-beating heart. No. Bullied back into being a child. He won't do it. He can't do it. He will claw his hands bloody before he lets Dean drag him back down into that swamp. Fucking with him was a mistake, coming back in the first place was a mistake, and he had known that immediately, and still he is surprised at the abject depth of his own failure to keep his sanity, and if he's not vigilant he will be buried deeper than he ever has been, and he will choke to death.

::

He emerges at night to find Dean drunk, far drunker than usual. Sam hates it. It shuts him down and takes him away, makes him dull and restless. Sam is so angry with him still, at being put in his place this morning like a wayward child, and now he has to trail after him and make sure he doesn't do a header down the stairs and kill himself.

“Fuck off,” Dean growls, the second time Sam takes the car keys out of his hand. “You think I can't handle it?” 

“I know you can't.” Sam pushes him up the garage steps and Dean stumbles, and Sam has to catch the back of his jacket and help him the rest of the way. At the top he hooks Sam's arm, his lapel, staring askance at his shoes, the spines of library books, wincing at the lights.

“Sam, wait. Sam,” he says. His face cracks and Sam has to look away. He is too much. “It wasn't like this.”

“I got a new lamp,” Sam says, pretending not to know. Of course it's always been like this, but Sam usually knows where to store it. He footnotes it and files it where proper. What else could he do? Grab and need like Dean, sprawl out so messily, hung and gutted like a deer, flies swarming? He had tried that, and it brought him Ruby, stepping daintily through blood clots. 

“Where the fuck did you go?” Dean says, rubbing the heels of his hands deep into his eyes. Sam still has hold of his sleeve. His arm shakes in tandem.

“I'm right here,” he says, impatience tightening his voice. “Right where I always am.” Dean makes a soft sceptical noise, defeated, and Sam thaws, pity coming to him, reluctantly fond. “Come on,” he says, and shushes him, brushes his hands away, fixes his collar. “Come to bed.”

He blushes, hearing himself, but Dean doesn't notice, and gratitude tenderises Sam further. He hitches an arm around his brother and brings him along – could be any night of the last ten years, arm-in-arm across a parking lot or shabby motel carpet, except tonight Dean has a bed that remembers him, and his guns, and his vinyl, and tucked into the frame of the mirror is a picture of their mother. He picks up the photo. She remains as ever someone else's memory: Dean's, pressing her love into his four-year-old cheek. 

He puts it back and rustles up a bucket and glass of water and heads back to his own bare room, shutting the door on the three of them.

::

He leaves as often as he can. He heads into Topeka for ammo and salt and paint and a new portable printer. He goes jogging dawn and dusk through the forest, along paths spiralling the power station, noting escape routes and air vents, clean and clear of debris but well-hidden, carved over with symbols.

Dean invites himself along sometimes, thudding along behind Sam, steady and unnerving, but mostly he escapes unhindered, needing to be alone in the monotonous purity of the evening, sunset edging a golden halo around grey-green leaves, multitudes sparking out like angels falling. Most days it helps keep his mind clear, helps him shake loose. Some days his mind follows its own paths.

He has hazy recollections of Gadreel's dream, a steady solid case worked in tandem, flashes of Dean's surprised and deep-run gleeful grin at a case involving cheerleaders, but for some reason Dean had spurned their gratitude. They had gone back to the bunker – Sam recognises this night now as one from soon after they'd found the place, laptop on the library table, drinks in hand watching _A New Hope_ and next to him was Dean, just plain Dean, without the overlay of years, the weight of all the rest of it, and in his reflection Sam had been foolish and happy. That should have been the first sign. His elbow had rested against Dean's like a miracle. 

He can't dream it again, without Gadreel. 

Instead he has his own dreams. Only logical after everything, so he doesn't let them weigh, not the sex ones at least, as intense as they are without even any penetration, pushing so hard at his brother, forehead to forehead again, hand to shoulder: like some ancient war game, sweat oil-slick, breath like a furnace. They are surrounded by limbs and Dean's eyes are fever-bright. 

These dreams are not so problematic. He's had practise putting such things to rest. His adolescence had featured something similar, dense impressions of musculature, hands and hipbones curving down, faceless and deniable amid the assortment of breasts and narrow waists, women's thighs opening to him. Sex dreams are nothing. He expects them.

Less easy to take in stride are the ones he has time to time, driving through a gossamer dusk, skimming, the engine a quiet thrumming tingle, pleasing in his chest and dick. Often he stretches his arm along the seat to rest his fingers at the nape of Dean's neck. Often his eye catches on the corner of Dean's soft smile. The land around them is empty and formless, and everything is the grey-pink of a Midwestern winter sunset. Dean is maybe twenty-four, twenty-five; time that Sam lost to Stanford regained now, as they rise and fall with the road, deep breaths they breathe in unison, ceaseless and together.

The light from his dream matches to the dusk and he's sprinting, he finds, feet pushing hard off the ground, sweat damp in his hair, staring up while he should be looking where he's going, and he steps wrong: rocks turn under his feet, throwing him down the side of the hill to fetch up palm-first against a tree. He hits his head, teeth clacking together painfully, familiar taste of iron on his tongue.

It is a quarter-hour walk back. His knee shrieks. He cleans at his face with his shirt and spits his mouth clear of blood.

Inside he starts out for the bathroom and finds himself by Dean, who is asleep, laid out flat atop the quilt, only his boots off. He shouldn't be napping this late in the day. His lashes are very distinct. Maybe he woke up, twenty minutes ago, and wondered if Sam was okay.

Not really, Sam could tell him. He is covered in grazes, can see already bruises coming up purple and hot under his skin, and nothing is hard within him any more. He is a mess sitting at end of a bed. He should stand and wash but the step after standing stymies him, and where to after that? A cave, a brother, a car, a library, an angel. There is nowhere else. 

“Sam?”

Dean squints at him and he says his brother's name in autonomic reply. He looks down at his hands and pulls skin off his palms with a strange internal coldness. He is fine. Had worse. Everything is manageable. 

“You went running without me?” Dean says, smothered in sleep. Sam holds up his hands, mouth curling up at the corner.

“I fell.”

Dean shades his eyes and starts to push himself up and Sam lays a hand high on his chest, in the same place as before, an imprint there now maybe, remembering him. No pressure, but Dean sinks under it. His chest starts to heave; the zip of his jacket bites into Sam's skinned palm. Blood seeping into the flannel now.

Dean's eyes are dark, fixed on Sam's. His fingers flex in the sheets and Sam feels it like they're pulling him through a fog. He knows those hands. He needs those hands. He can recite a list thirty years long of the places they've hauled him out of. 

“What,” Dean says, and swallows.

Sam leaves.

::

He wakes the next morning at the library table with a crick in his neck, sore all over and scabs pulling, to a banging on the door. Cas is on the other side, and he frowns at Sam.

“What happened to you?”

“Can't run in a straight line,” Sam says, waving his hand dismissively, half-laughing in embarrassment, and gets a wry look in return. Sam grins at him, claps him on the shoulder and escorts him down the stairs like they're in a Regency novel. 

“Cas!” Dean cries, like a dying man, from down on the war room floor.

“Hello, Dean. It's good to see you.”

By Dean's account Cas had been happy to be a human, but Sam can't wish that he had never been regraced. When he smiles at Sam it feels like it comes from him, and somewhere beyond, somewhere bigger than them all. Even after everything that's still a comfort. 

Cas puts his fingertips to Sam's forehead and cheeks and closes his eyes. Dean blanches in Sam's periphery, but it doesn't hurt anymore. When Gadreel first left, Cas's touch had been like a freezer-burn against his skin, leaving behind red welts daily, easing slowly over the course of the week. The last of him they had taken out with a syringe, the worst day of all, and at the end of it Cas had touched him and told him he was free. 

Today they are equalised, and after a second Cas tilts his head and nods, satisfied.

“Thanks, Cas.” He steps back and twists his neck experimentally.

“It's nothing.”

“Hang on, wait,” Dean says, hand hovering in the air, eyes narrowed. “He's definitely clean?”

“I'm certain.”

Something flies across Dean's face, too fast for Sam to nail down, and he looks between them, acerbic taste in his mouth.

“Looks like I'm all me, Dean. Why do you ask?” 

Dean stares at him, long seconds, spots of colour high on his cheeks. Sam holds his gaze, blood rising, until he breaks.

“Oh, no reason I'm sure,” he mutters, fiddling with his pockets, and Sam should be used to this by now, his sheer gall, managing Sam's body like he's Dean's gun, his car.

“Anyone else you wanna call? A priest maybe?” He says, and Dean scoffs and turns to Cas and invites him on the hunt in Florida like Sam is nothing, a gnat, an interloper.

“I'm sorry, Dean.” Cas shakes his head regretfully. “Angel business.”

“Great. Well, thanks for your help, it was super helpful.” Dean smiles, caustic, and disappears through the archway, his back set in rigid furious lines. Had he honestly thought Sam wouldn't figure it out? 

“He is angry at you.”

“He has his reasons,” Sam says, and deflates. He is tired, done with this. He scrubs at his face, echoes of his scabs still tight across his skin. One day maybe his body will reach its limit and just laugh at Cas's miracles. “How are you going?” 

Cas does his version of a shrug.

“My brothers and sisters are in disarray. Harming each other, harming themselves. I'm trying to help, but they are being--” He frowns. “Difficult.”

“Is it Metatron?”

“Yes and no; some follow him. But they all have the same desire. To return to Heaven.”

“Then why are they fighting?”

Cas sighs and looks up, studying the ceiling or the sky beyond, considering.

“We are made to be warriors. Most of them, it's the only way they know. Some even wish me to lead a faction.”

“You've tried that before,” Sam says, unable to disguise his alarm, and Cas looks at him, irony in his eyes, his fathomless voice; kindness there too, like he is trying to let Sam down gently.

“I am beginning to think I have no choice in the matter.”

Sam shakes his head. Cas doesn't get it. Cas is the living proof.

“You always have a choice.”

“I am beginning to think that's a lie,” Cas says, like it's that simple, and Sam has no words for him, standing here in his grandfather's bunker, his father's bible within eyesight, his strongarm brother slamming doors down below.

::

“You know, I can do this one by myself,” Dean says, tossing his shotguns in the trunk, a tin of salt, looking anywhere but Sam. It rankles.

“What does that mean?”

“You don't have to come along on on this one. If you don't want.”

“I can hunt, Dean.”

“I didn't say you couldn't.”

Sam grits his teeth, throwing his bag in the back seat.

“I'm not gonna do anything.”

“I didn't say you would.”

“I'm coming,” he says, and regrets it twelve hours later, passing through Clarksville looking for a motel, and he recognises corners and trees like a brand set to his chest. The speed limit down main street is a crawl, thanks to nightworks; the scenery drags by like molasses. Sam crossed this street every day for three weeks in 2001, on the way to school, or, on the weekends, on the way to the supermarket, picking up past-its-use-by chocolate with spare change like he was five instead of seventeen and desperate.

Darting a glance at Dean he can see that Dean has not done this on purpose, has not even noticed, quiet and shut-down in his own head. What a cosmic joke his life is. Cas leads an army; Sam ends up back here. The whole town is suffused still with his claustrophobia. Three weeks spent here working his guilt and fear and anger into the steps he trod, the books he clutched, the grasping way he watched Dean move through the world, storing up his laughs and frowns. 

Welcome to Clarksville. The town in which he decided to leave.

He wedges his fingers into the door handle and crooks them, straightens his back and summons a dispassionate military eye, stripping the view outside to base topographical meaning. He was here, of a time. He is thirty now. He started the end of the world, and stopped it.

He steers them to a motel on the other side of town and the pressure eases. This room, with its cheery dead-bird motif, could be anywhere in the country. The other place, Sam remembers, had been nicer. 

They had been dumped there so Dad could work a job in Bowling Green. The owner of the motel owed Dad a favour, and Dean had also picked up odd jobs around the place: cleaning the pool, and repairing air conditioners; painting doors and veranda posts. Sam had spent a lot of time watching him over the top of his algebra and history textbooks, twitchy with an old anger, nameless and shiftless to see his brother who had killed monsters and saved Sam's life reduced to this just so they had enough cash for food and gas. 

Sam would bring his study gear out to the pool, claim the spot under the threadbare umbrella and suffocate in the May heat, as his brother sweat through his shirt in the sun. He seemed to enjoy the work. Sifting every last leaf out of the pool. Scrubbing down the grimy tiles and plastic chairs, turning them upside down to get in the hidden nooks. Pulling down the doors and hauling them out into the light to sand them down and paint them. 

This last move had broken Sam. He was tired all the time, weary in his stretched-out body, weary in this punishing heat, weary of the children he saw around him at school. Different faces, but the same. Pointless to try to talk to them, and they didn't talk to him. He resented them for not being interesting enough. He resented Dad for making him move, never giving those kids a chance.

But when he got home from school Dean would be out there, and they would work near each other until the light turned grey, and then Dean would put down the net or rehang the door and disappear into their room. Sam would collapse into the pool and do half-hearted laps or just float there, thinking about how easily Dean's body worked, how skinny he himself was in comparison to his Dad and his brother. How content they seemed to be to trip on and on along this road, no glance to the side, no space for anything that wasn't grubby and deathly and full of people's pain. Dean, who could be anything, who could do anything at _all_ , under threat of death once a week. 

And Dean would come out, clean and clear as an idol, and Sam would tread water and stare at him as he stared at the sunset and told Sam which bar he was heading to, and he would come back just after midnight bringing with him the stink of smoke and booze and sex, Sam didn't know exactly but it had to be sex, or just the desire laid across Dean by everyone who looked at him. Dean would drop on top of his sheets and Sam would be still, so still, another half hour breathing and dying in the overwhelming presence of his brother before finally falling asleep.

And every morning he would wake in that hot, stale room and wash in the shrimp-coloured shower-bath, get ready for school around Dean's sleeping form, always bare on either his top or bottom half, and he would eat whatever shitty sugary cereal they had found in the sale bin and stare firmly out the window across the parking lot towards the pool and think about how this was one of the good motels, and swear to himself that one day there would be an end to it, a last one, a last time.

::

“This town seem familiar to you?” Dean asks, on the way out, and Sam, rustling down in the seat, finding the sweet spot for his knees against the dash, lets go of the hope that it would have passed unnoticed.

“This whole country seems familiar to me,” he says. His heels knock together at every corner.

And then on the freeway exit, one that hadn't even existed twelve years ago, they pass behind the motel. It has fallen on hard times. Its pool is empty and black with grime, and Dean's hands clench on the wheel, cheeks flushing. Sam watches it grow, watches Dean swallow and readjust his hold, lines on his face carving deeper as his jaw clenches. He shrugs his shoulder like Sam's gaze is a hand he can slide out from underneath.

“Penny for your thoughts,” Sam says, voice rougher than he was expecting. It sounds unused. Dean tends to talk first these days. Sometimes all Sam has is watching. 

“Stop it,” Dean snaps. 

Sam blinks and turns his eyes to the front. It's a stopgap measure, plywood in a cyclone. Dean is a gravity well. There will never be a time when Sam will not be able to look at him. Those three weeks here he had watched Dean so much it nearly killed him and even that was not so different from the preceding seventeen years of his life. 

Stanford had cured him of that by force, dumped new objects in his field of vision, dumped entire trees of knowledge in his head that had nothing to do with Dad, or monsters, or his brother. He had gotten away. He doesn't even remember anymore whether he had truly believed it would be for good.

::

The shifter operates outside of Jacksonville proper, in a town with four overdoses in the six months, prescriptions all collected at the same drugstore by loved ones who swear they never did. Staking the place out is easy but sitting in the car with Dean for hours on end is not, so they split up, Sam left to loiter for hours outside the store. He heads in eventually, bored out of his brain, to check out the staff, fill forged scripts for penicillin and tramadol, restock their first aid kit.

His instincts don't ping at all. They seem normal. His phone camera, discreetly purposed, reveals no shining eyes, but he goes in again the second day with another script just so he can wait in the chairs by the dispensary, enjoying the clean bustle of the place, the utter mundanity, the locals coming and going. Most of them are old, and known by name.

The doors slide open to admit his brother in jeans and a navy shirt with a logo on it, a bunch of flowers resting in his arms like a baby. He strolls past Sam without a glance and leans an elbow on the counter, dings the bell obnoxiously. When a pair of pharmacists come out from the back room he fixes on the prettier one and gives her the flowers, turns it on.

“Secret admirer,” reads her workmate, and she raises her eyebrows in confusion.

Dean whistles. 

“Any idea?” He asks, and she shakes her head. “A pretty girl like you? You must have guys knocking down your door.”

“I wish,” she laughs.

“Girls? Come on, you can tell me,” Dean grins, nodding his head in conspiracy with the other woman, but it's more laughs, more denial. “No one new at all, huh.” 

She twists her mouth in mock regret. Dean leans in again, his legs lengthening with that out-curving line, definition of his back showing through the shirt and she leans too, drawn in like a reflection as he casts his gaze around, natural as you please. It lights on Sam, inscrutable.

“Hey guy, you got a crush?” 

She laughs again and flaps her hands and apologises to Sam, and Dean keeps staring at him, easy ignorant grin on his face, and Sam has to chuckle and shake his head, in this airless and over-bright room, pinned to his chair like a bug in a specimen case as his brother elegantly swaps a tip for her number. They are still flirting when Sam's fake name is called, three times before he realises, and they are still flirting as he leaves, and Dean returns late that night but not too late, not damningly late: Sam doesn't know what he's been doing except that there was booze involved, lying in the dark listening to Dean's heavy drunken tread, the insecure jangle of his keys in the lock and on the bedside table.

::

Dean doesn't meet up with her again, as far as Sam can tell; instead, he tries to set Sam up, in a coffee shop across the road from the drugstore. A mom-and-pop place, tiny round tables with doilies, huge but terrible coffees, huge pies. Three hours now and Dean has been picking at his second slice of caramel for eons, infinitely monotonous. There's been no sign of a shifter, no more overdoses, nothing he can find that would link those victims in a way a shifter or any monster other than human would find attractive. Sam sighs and pushes away his laptop.

“I'm beginning to doubt your research skills, Sammy.” Dean mutters. “Why would a shifter use drugs anyway? They're more the hack and slash types.”

Sam shrugs, and swigs his coffee. 

“Maybe it's trying to be normal.”

Dean rolls his eyes and leans back on his chair, surveys the room. 

“Hey, check it out,” he says, low, after a moment. 

Sam snaps his head up, following Dean's gaze to the tables in the corner. A group of high-school kids; a woman with a laptop, brace of papers beside her.

“What?”

“Looks like she could do with a coffee.”

“And?”

“You should get her one.”

“What? Why?” He says it already knowing the answer, unable to believe it, and Dean widens his eyes meaningfully, like he can mind-control Sam into assaulting some poor stranger with the insanity of their lives. “Seriously?” 

“She's a giant nerd. Just your type, Sammy.”

“You care so much, you hook up with her,” he says, flat and halfway to angry. He pulls his laptop back in and clicks blindly, tab to tab in his browser, folklore sketches and blocks of newsprint blurring into each other. He chews on the inside of his cheek, bracing himself for the next bit of juvenalia.

“Look at her. Nice body. Smart. Dark hair. Can't tell me you don't like dark hair,” Dean says. It's a farce. Sam's fingers twitch over the keys, longing to curl into fists.

“Quit it, Dean. I'm not interested.”

“Maybe you should be. Maybe you should shut your brain up for a second.”

Sam flicks his eyes up and holds Dean's gaze and Dean tenses, and it's there, it's always fucking there now, folding him in, pricking his skin. Dean flushes, narrows his own eyes. They sit like that a few seconds until Dean shakes his head, slowly.

“You know what your problem is? You need to grow up.”

Blood pounds in Sam's ears. 

“Grow up or get out of my head? Make up your mind.”

“You think I don't know what's going on?” Dean taps his own temple, like he has a photocopy of Sam’s whole being stored up there. “I'm sick of your games, Sam. You wanna be alone, own it. I'm not going anywhere.” 

Sam laughs. The sound dies, ugly and short, in the limp cafe air. So typical, for Dean to abdicate his responsibility. It's always Sam's choice when too much is too much. 

He stands, too tall, looming over Dean, who has to tip his head back to keep eye contact. Behind him the teenagers snigger, and it's all too pointless to bother with, the unwashed spectacle of them in this main-street complacency, looping from town to town, Sam's life so far and the life to come, looking down on his brother, hands in his pockets and a mission ahead.

“I'll take night watch,” he says, and walks the block twice instead, trying to reel himself back in, piece by piece, but none of them belong to him. This is a lesson that he learned years ago and daily since, and yet here he patrols, barricaded against the world, petulantly refusing to choose anything that's already been chosen for him.

::

He wakes to the smell of coffee and the sight of Dean at the laptop, paper spread out next to him. He's had three hours' sleep and it's cold and he feels justified staying under the covers, cocooned up to his neck. He wishes he were back in the bunker, no pressure to rise for the day. Surveillance has never really been his thing and four mornings have seeped by now with nothing to show. The whole thing has been a wash.

Dean takes the lid off his coffee and drinks, and as he shifts the sun emerges from behind his shoulder and hits Sam in the face, cold and hazy. He closes his eyes.

He had liked a girl once whose mother turned out to be a witch, had watched her buy horse magazines and gummi snakes at the corner store, watched her walk back the half-block to her redstone and sit on the steps, bathed in the sun, a lazy post-school afternoon ahead of her. Dean and Dad had been watching her. They were all three in the car, staking out the girl's family, and he had hated that they got to see her too. Sam felt guilty for watching, but at least he had good intentions. She was about his age, and he saw her as a person, instead of a clue or a victim. She was real out there, and she didn't know that they were watching.

They killed her mother, and Sam couldn't say the woman didn't deserve it, at least not after they found those bones; not after she'd hexed Dean, after he saw the bruises. He'd stopped breathing, seeing the blood spread slowly under Dean's skin, across his ribs, his forearms and back like an oil spill poorly contained, malevolent with purpose. He had put his hands over them and they'd come away clean, and Dean so blasé had scruffed his hair, told him not to worry. Dad would fix it.

They'd done it in her home. Sam was responsible for barricading the girl in her room, had stood outside her door hauling back on the door knob as she threw her weight behind her side of it. He'd pictured her with her feet against the door frame, straining, but he was strong enough that summer, thirteen and growing. She had given up trying to open the door eventually and started pounding on on it, pleading. He had tried to find words for her, but Dean was hollering below, and when the shot rang out and she stilled entirely Sam gave off, threw himself downstairs and helped his dad pick his brother off the floor.

“You awake?”

He groans and hitches himself further under the covers, trying to make the day disappear. 

“You know, there's a warg up in Georgia.”

He won't look at Sam properly, and his voice deepens and roughens even further when he talks to Sam these days. Most days Sam can remember pretty clearly how Dean used to sound. He can remember Dean's voice from before it broke, even. He can remember all of it. 

“Earth to Sam. You wanna get out of here?”

“God, yes,” he says, too loud, and sits up. He scrubs at his scalp and between his fingers watches Dean nod to himself, face carefully blank, unmarred this morning by bruise or bloodstain. He has heard women talk about Dean's face in filthy, hungry words. Once, memorably, a man of their father's age, when Dean had just hit eighteen, invoking God in consideration of Dean's mouth. He tries to see what they see sometimes, catches it like the wink of a fluorescent, the riptide perfection of him, but Dean will never be a stranger to him, as much as Sam might wish it, as much as it might save them both.

::

The warg sends them back north, and Sam is grateful. He wants to see mountains. He wants to see long, endless highways, and turning onto Route 19 unlocks something in him. He loves this road, the way the trees slope down. Once as a kid he saw a golden eagle floating along high above the treeline, and he'd paused in reaching forward to draw Dean's attention. He had tracked her across the sky and kept her for himself. They live for decades, he thinks. She might still be going.

 _Zep II_ clacks and grinds its way over to the B side and Dean grins to himself and bobs with the riff, that four-time build that's haunted Sam his whole life. He remembers hiding from it under crappy walkman headphones when he was a kid, trying to disappear into _Ill Communication_ like the rest of his classmates. He doesn't hate it though, not anymore, and it fits these highways like a glove: he pictures it blasting out of that MG in the garage. Top down, engine loud. She'd look good in her cherry and her chrome, under the sun. Dean had polished her not two weeks ago. 

“Hey, how do you think that old Roadster would run out here?”

“Why?” Dean throws him a suspicious glance.

“Think it would keep up with the Impala?”

“What are you, crazy?” Dean says, automatically smug, reaching out to run his fingers along the dash, but he's frowning too. Dean wouldn't want him out of the car. Dean wants him right here. 

He couldn't bring that car out on these roads. She would be outclassed immediately. She wasn't built for it. Dean could tune her until the cows came home and he would always be playing catch up, chasing the Impala's rear lights forever into the dark. 

He curls his fingers down on top of his thumbs and makes a fist, pulling at the joints of his thumbs, digging his nails into his palm. When he opens up his hands they move with a rheumatic old-man pain, portent and presage of the future.

::

They camp in a space at the top of a track and it's warm enough for just the sleeping bags, stars above, protected by the fire and some runes Dean scratches into the trees and the ground. They never do this any more. Last time Sam went camping was with Amelia in Silver City, three days hiking and munching trail mix, Riot throwing himself up and down the track. They had slept in a three-person tent that he could barely lie flat in, and watched episodes of _Antiques Roadshow_ on her iPad, and worn sweats instead of bedding down boots and all. He had only taken two guns.

Dean back under trees at night worries him. Sam had foreseen the outdoor sleep in his bones and stashed away crackers, chocolate and marshmallows at a gas station in Dahlonega, and after they've settled at the fire he pulls them out of his duffel and tosses them across. Dean is stunned. He turns them over in his hand and grins at Sam, wide and shining.

It's astounding that he can still smile at all. It's quicksand to see Dean like this, spiking the marshmallows on a stick and leaning forward to hold them over the embers, light flickering across his face. Out here, far from the bunker, from angels and demons, from anything but the hunt ahead, he can almost imagine that this is enough for them. He can almost imagine it can sustain him through the rest of it. 

Dean leans over and Sam puts his hand out like a supplicant. He forgets to eat, watching Dean make his own, bite in with relish, eyes closed.

“Awesome,” he says, mouth full, disgusting, and Sam grins.

“No 'smores in Purgatory, huh?”

Dean glances over, wry.

“Not much of anything there except trees and mud.” He looks around. “Too much of everything here.”

“Only one of me,” Sam says, on a breath. He is very still. The fire gutters and hides Dean's face. 

“Jesus, what would I do with two of you,” he says, and Sam's heart runs wild at the crack in his voice. This is what Sam brought on them. He should have wrought some binding on himself. He should have left. Two Sams at Dean's disposal: lock up the one, smother the other, probably. Be disappointed by them both.

::

The runes fail them.

Sam wakes to the sudden yelping disappearance of Dean beside him, the slap of Dean's hand against his legs, his fingers clutching for purchase. He grabs his gun and rolls forward, nearly emptying the clip but Dean is being dragged by the foot, sleeping bag and all, and he has to aim high. 

He takes off and immediately trips and crashes down, barely protecting his face with his arms. Something sharp hits his ribcage and skids along. He staggers to his feet, pain from what must be a busted toe screaming up his leg. His ribs are bleeding, but it feels like a shallow cut. He shakes his head clear and looks around.

The warg is fast and the night is dark, quarter-moon under the trees, but he has no problem following Dean's shouts and curses, the creature's growls, the heavy indeterminate thuds. He hurtles after them, clawing himself around tree-trunks and heaving his busted foot across the uneven ground, twisting and scratching over branches and rocks and roots. It'll be a miracle if Dean makes it out of this without a concussion.

But Dean is still conscious, still cursing, still responding to his name, and Sam follows it like a beacon. He reaches them at small closed-over clearing, the warg forcing its way backwards into the undergrowth, pulling Dean with it. The angle is still unfortunate, Dean between them, but if they get into the undergrowth he's lost them for the night and he risks a couple of shots towards its hindquarters.

It yelps, then screams, and takes off, pushing branches aside. It's bigger than he realised.

“Dean!” He rushes forward, and gets a groan in return, Dean's hands batting at him as he tries to grab him, to pull him out of the bushes. He gets his hand under Dean's armpit and hauls. The bag stays caught on a branch and he slides right out.

“It's circling,” Dean says, hoarse, and pushes him, and Sam hears the click of claw on rock at his rear and throws himself to the side. It misses him by inches, and they both land badly. 

The warg recovers quicker. Fear brightens the world a little and he can see the black void of it stalking towards him, at least three feet high, massive across the shoulders. It growls, low and vibratory and terrifying. He can feel it in his bones and he scrambles back and to his feet, getting a bad shot off. One left, if he didn't count wrong. He backs up carefully, watching for a charge. 

“Hey, Fido!” 

A rock hits it in the ribcage; another in the muzzle, and it twists its head to snap and Sam launches forward, hits it at the point of its shoulder and brings it down on its side.

It's pure muscle and writhing underneath him, snapping above his head. Something's wrong with one of its hind legs but it's able to get the other up, trying to claw his belly. He punches it in the ribs, weakly at this angle, and ducks his head, avoiding its teeth, its forelegs, thicker around than his wrists, all bone and sinew. He shoves at the underneath of its jaw with his forearm, braces the gun against the soft tissue there and shoots. The sound is catastrophic, bright stench of gore and gunpowder like a brick to the skull. 

It goes limp underneath him and he collapses as well, face down in its rank fur, gasping for breath and Dean pulls at him, rolls him. His head knocks against the ground. His body is jelly, his ears still ringing, and Dean's hands are everywhere. 

“Jumping on a warg, you fucking asshole, you crazy son of a bitch,” Dean says, tight with fear, and then his hand stops on Sam's ribs, fitting itself along the cut there. “Sam?”

“It's okay, I'm okay, it's just a scratch,” he says, and Dean makes a broken manic sound and punches him in the shoulder. 

“What the fuck were you thinking?”

“I dunno, saving your ass?” Sam gasps, incredulous. 

“I had it under control!”

Sam laughs at that, helplessly, and Dean punches him in the shoulder again, his sore one where he hit the warg, and his laughter turns dark in the space of a millisecond, turns into a growl, bared teeth as he contorts and puts Dean over on his back.

Dean takes the momentum and rolls him again and this time he's the one bucking in panic, pressed down, a hard body above him knocking aside his hands and pushing him into the ground. Dean's knees flank his thighs but he hasn't locked down Sam's legs yet, and Sam sets a heel to the ground and heaves his hips up as Dean grabs his wrists out of the air, pulls them apart and bears down, bringing them chest to chest, groin to groin like it was planned that way. 

Dean is hard, getting harder. Sam, heart racing, mind gone, pushes up into him. 

“Jesus, Sam,” Dean chokes.

“Grown up enough for you?” He grits, and pushes up a third time, hard in his jeans again for Dean, and Dean groans, a dark and deep sound, and his fingers close tighter around Sam's wrists and bring them up above his head, stretching Sam out, no air between them and Sam is exposed and dying in it as Dean moves on him, rocking, rutting down.

“Are you here? Huh? Are you here?” His words are damp on Sam's neck, his shoulders broad and heavy, covering him, and Sam's going to do it, even though he said he wouldn't, here in the dirt, insane and reeking. This will be the end of him, and at the touch of Dean's lips to his throat, blunt teeth closing on his skin, he squirms, trying to get purchase. Dean shifts to hook his shins over Sam's, and in the process he kicks Sam and yelps in pain and jerks back, losing his grip and Sam yanks free and pushes, rolls out from under him. 

He stays on his side, panting, body curled around protectively. His erection dies a slow death and the whole world fades with it. He could close his eyes now and never open them again. 

Behind him Dean is moving, and makes a soft hurt sound. It had taken him by the boot, Sam remembers, and braces his hands on the ground, forcing himself up. Dean is sitting knee bent, probing at his ankle. There's barely any light, but he can't see any dark stains of blood. Dean hisses when Sam touches his boot, and yanks his foot away.

“Come on,” Sam sighs, and hooks an arm under Dean's shoulders. He's close to a dead weight, either unready or incapable of getting his good leg under him, and Sam hops, trying to bear them both on his uninjured foot. 

“What is it?”

“Broke my toe running after your Pedigree Pal ass,” Sam says. “So don't think you've got a monopoly on woe is me.”

They start off, some poor-man's three-legged shuffle. What a pair. He feels blind, and Dean is breathing poorly.

“How's your back? Your head?” He bends his arm to check Dean's skull. His hair is dirty, clogged with dirt and leaves but there's no blood that he can tell. He breaks up a little clump of dirt with his fingers and combs it out.

“Head's fine,” Dean says, shaking it from under Sam's hand, and huffs a small derogatory laugh. “Back's gonna be sore.”

The trek back seems five times longer than the cannonball run down, and he worries more than once that he's missed the site completely, doomed them to walking in fading circles for eternity. Only the smell of ashes twitches his head to the right, and he catches the shine of his own sleeping bag.

He cuts Dean's boot off by lantern-light and it could be worse; the warg's teeth stymied by bag and jeans and leather mostly, it seems, but the bruising and swelling speak of a sprain. He hands Dean the flask and wraps his ankle, and then turns him and looks over his back, cleans two nasty grazes as best he can, digs specks of rock from under the skin as Dean flinches. He keeps it brusque and impersonal. The ridge of Dean's spine shows clearly; his fingers bump over it, over the disappeared scar from a childhood fall that used to bisect his right scapula. Around his own wrist is Dean's handprint in blood.

He pulls Dean's shirt back down and turns to himself, taping his toe, washing down his face. His eyes are grainy with exhaustion. His shirt pulls uncomfortably, stuck to his ribs with blood, and his shoulder aches from hitting the warg; the minor scratches and cuts on his hands sting from the antiseptic he used on Dean's grazes. Dean looks like a ghost under the artificial light, leaning back on a pile of their bags and bedding, flask clutched to his chest, eyes closed and mouth tight with pain. One day he will be drained of blood entirely and Sam, if he is lucky, will be left again with his empty body to bury. 

He opens his eyes and Sam, caught, hesitates. He doesn't blink. Sam offers his hand, and Dean's glance flicks down to it and back up before he pushes up onto his elbows and hobbles to his feet unassisted. Sam bites his tongue and turns to cover the dead fire. Behind him Dean limps, and rolls their remaining sleeping bag, and shoves their trash into a duffel. Erase all signs. Pretend they were never here.

Sam's not going back down that hill for the warg. He's not going to cut it up or burn it or salvage its knuckles or fur for summoning spells. It can rot here, just another piece of detritus in the forest, home to maggots and bugs and if anyone sees it who shouldn't they can die here too for all he cares.

::

Back in the bunker, finally, after another endless day of driving, Dean bitching in the passenger seat about taking turns too slow and Sam getting his rearview mirror out of whack when he wasn't passed out, and it takes all of five hours before the walls start to crush Sam. The world may as well have ended; nothing has changed while they were gone. Cas has nothing for them, and somehow they end up always in the same argument about different inconsequential shit: Sam needs to manage his own fucking affairs, and Dean needs to have things the way he wants them.

“I've spent the last three decades cleaning up after you Sam.” Dean slams cutlery in the sink. “The least you can do is your own dishes.”

“Yeah, leave a bowl out and open the door to chaos,” Sam snipes. Dean's lips are a thin line.

“Do I look like Rosie the Robot to you? Clean your shit up.”

Sam can't reply, too busy fuming. Maybe if Dean climbed down off his cross Sam would be happier to wash his shit within five seconds of finishing with it, and he knows how petty he's being but it's intolerable, Dean is utterly intolerable, unbearable, sandpaper on raw nerves.

He stands and rinses his bowl under the tap, dumps it with the others still wet and spreads his hands out questioningly. Dean folds his arms, glaring.

“And cut your fucking hair, you're a disgrace to the service.”

Sam steps forward. His voice is soft. He feels dangerous.

“Or what?” 

Ending in a challenge, infantile as it is, makes Sam's heart pound, but Dean abandons him, chickens out and leaves him wanting, and he storms to his room and jerks off lying on his back, hand braced against the headboard and heels digging into the mattress, replaying their grind from the forest, furious and dire, pushing his head back into his pillow, pushing his hips up against Dean. Always pushing and fighting for his air, his space, his own goddamn body, colonised by everyone who's ever laid eyes on him; colonised again by the person who had him first and forever, and when he comes he's wrecked, panting like he's been sprinting, running a maze with no exit.

::

At night he dreams familiar dreams: his skin charring under Lucifer's hand, sloughing into the void; Dad's eyes demon-yellow as he grins wide and sickly; Dean's mouth making its way down his chest, the car throbbing beneath them, rudderless over field and bayou.

He wakes feeling like he's not slept at all, joints creaking, eyes crusted. He washes his face in the kitchen sink and re-tapes his toe and grabs a yogurt for lunch, lip curling when he sees the brand. It's too sweet. Dean probably bought it on purpose, taking his revenge in the dairy aisle. 

He can't run, and he's too tired for exercise. He can't face the car again so soon.

In the library the books accuse him, spines lining the walls like fenceposts. He should be looking for Gadreel and Abbadon. He should be researching. It was good enough for Kevin. He bumps his index finger along them, picking up molecules of gold leaf. Men of Letters, of Esoterica. Men of secrets and death. One day, he knows, he will regret not hooking a finger over the curve of worn leather and levering one out, paging through it. Someone will likely get hurt.

He fishes his gun and some clips out of his bedside drawer, and heads down to the range.

It's in use.

Dean's reloading when Sam opens the door, and even though his head is lowered Sam can see him roll his eyes. Sam clenches his jaw and takes the farthest booth. His first run is good, far better than in the woods two nights ago, and he pulls it in and pokes his finger through the holes, forehead and chest, neatly clustered. 

As a kid he'd had to make do with tree stumps, and leaves nailed into fence posts; Coke cans, and then later bottles of PBR. Cans were better, of course. You could reuse them half the time, and you didn't leave glass lurking for deer or cattle. But Dean had loved the widescreen romance of draining a bottle, and setting it up, and letting Sam loose. How Sam had strived back then, when Dean's pride was going cheap. All he'd had to do was breathe to make his brother happy. 

Something small hits his back and he jumps and turns, as a shell pings onto the ground. Dean stands out of arm's reach, nervousness written on his face. They're three floors below road level, covered in concrete. They couldn't be more alone. He thinks of the motel outside of Philly, and feels, for the thousandth time, heavy, sorrowful regret like a punch in the heart. Dean can barely stand to be in the same room as him. What has he let his life become?

Dean folds his arms, and then drops them to his side. Sam drops his ear muffs to his neck and leans back against the booth and waits it out as Dean sighs, and shifts off his bad foot.

“Look, truce, okay? Can we just have a truce? I said I'm sorry.”

Sam nods, turns his gun in his hand, puts it down on the booth. Such spackle has been gluing them together imperfectly for years. 

“You really think that's gonna work?” He says, and Dean's truce turns to shit in seconds. He glares at Sam, bright and furious. 

“You wanna leave, just leave. I'm not gonna stop you.”

“Been there, done that.” Sam shrugs, his shoulders heavy. He could sink into the ground. Cover himself in a white flag, let his muscles melt away. Dean searches his face, for intent or understanding or what, Sam has no idea.

“Jesus Christ,” he blurts, voice tight with frustration. “I got the message, Sam. I got it, so quit it.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I'm saying message fucking received, Sam. I've got it, I'm trying, I'm trying everything man, I don't know–” He swallows the rest down, stricken, desperate, and Sam coughs, taken aback.

“There's no message, Dean,” he says, strangled.

Dean reddens and the shutters come down. So easily he takes himself from Sam when he thinks he knows what's best, and Sam moves and reaches out a hand to the side of his neck, thumb laid along the line of his jaw, grazing the stubble. That young copper-blond that threatens to make Dean a stranger. The desire starts up in him, to put his lips there, to shift them along. Dean's mouth. 

His thumb is on Dean's lip, and Dean jerks his head like he's been slapped and backs up, out of the direct light. He raises a hand and wipes at his face. It might be shaking.

“Leave off,” he says, hoarse. 

Sam has nothing but the triumph of his own bleak destruction to lift him, but lifted he is, buoyed and bobbing downriver to the rapids.

“Jesus, Dean, what's the point?”

Dean swings his arms, taking in the room around them, the rooms above, wild and insistent, urgent with meaning that Sam can't parse.

“It's different now. It can be different.”

Sam laughs, turns and picks up his gun, checks the clip. 

“Man, you never learn,” he says and puts his muffs back on and wastes the rest of the afternoon and far too much ammo, over and over again the two little clusters, head and heart, and nothing will exorcise it, not the rightness of his body as it settles into the stance, not the muffled thud at each trigger pull, all and everything unsatisfactory in the wake of his brother.

::

And then, the next morning, a life-raft in the endless treacherous sea: a vamp attack in Rochester. Dean bundles them into the car with ill-concealed relief and they trawl through the ruins of the nest's last, poorly-hidden victims. Throats torn to red meat, mud packing in the gaps, smearing faces and staining hair. Nothing new.

Sam hates vampires.

They take a motel room to have a base of operations and spend rest of the evening sitting on the ends of their beds sharpening machetes and watching _M*A*S*H_ reruns. Later seasons, not as many laughs, but Dean is still in love with Hawkeye, and its soothing green-brown palette and the wash of whiskey and nostalgia relaxes Sam, and very soon he and his brother are shooting each other looks over the jokes, and the tension that has marked Dean's face these last weeks begins to ease.

“Remember Billings?” Sam asks, and Dean chuckles, looking down at his hands. 

“Yeah, I remember. I remember you falling out of that bed,” Dean says, and shoots Sam a wickedly fond glance that leaves Sam airless in the heavyweight presence of Dean's regard. How old had he been – nine? – and a nuisance. Nothing but a nuisance, bored with the reruns, shoving his way into Dean's single bed, dozing off and startling awake at a bomb blast out of the TV. Dean had laughed his guts out when he hit the floor, but it didn't matter so much in those days when Dean's attention was ever the goal, when Dean's laugh was the prize of the night and easily won.

“Oh, man,” he breathes, and rubs at his face, and falls back, to another motel bed, lucky motel bed number one million and one, lucky bed that gets to join the Sam Winchester Probably Had Nightmare Here club. The ceiling has a malformed banishing sigil blotched into it by a water stain. 

This will never be over.

What is he even fighting any more? He came back. He made the choice. Accept it, Sam, he thinks, and tries to write it into his bones, sidelong to the Enochian. Your Get Out of Jail Free cards have burned up on the ceiling. They have gone back to their husbands. 

“G'night, Dean,” he says, and turns away onto his side, and after a minute Dean says _night, Sammy_ , thickly, and turns off the lamp. The TV quiets, but light flickers through his eyelids for another hour like a home movie projection, the sprinklers they never ran through, the girls they never dated, the mother they never had.

::

The nest is smaller than they prepared for, after all those bodies. Three vicious kids, young vamps almost certainly, careless with their prey and cliché in their housing, shacking up in a dilapidated barn five miles out of town.

They go in at noon and Dean, taking the front door, beheads the girl on watch instantly. He's not quiet enough, though, and the other two rise up, still filthy, clothes dark with day-old and older gore. 

Sam has come in through the back, and when they rush Dean, he brings the girl down with the shotgun while Dean twists out of reach of the guy, comes back around with the machete and takes his head off.

Sam finishes the girl and looks at Dean, who shakes blood off his hands and stares down at the front of his shirt, grimacing in disgust.

“Fucking vampires,” he grumbles, and there it goes, Sam feels the call of it, that never-ending wail of apology. _I'm sorry Dean, I'm sorry, I wasn't myself, I'm sorry._ He crouches to wipe his blade on the girl's shirt. 

Above him, Dean sighs. His hand lands on Sam's shoulder, warm pressure, too brief.

“C'mon, Buffy, let's clean this mess up and go get something to eat.”

“Steak, rare,” Sam says, deadpan, and squints up at Dean, who surprises Sam with barked laugh, sharply amused. Dust motes float in the air between them.

Driving the long way back they are halted at train tracks, a freight train of immense proportions trundling steadily past, iron-rust and worn white brand names against the blue sky. The day is still warm, the windows down. He's full from lunch. He doesn't mind stopping.

“Fifty-three,” he says, as the last car passes, but Dean says fifty-two at the same time and Sam purses his lips and shakes his head regretfully.

“Fifty-three, Dean. Start again.”

Dean blinks at him, and curls his mouth. In this light his eyes are as green as the fields behind him, and Sam shifts in his seat, arm along the back of the seat, shoulder blades against the window, re-set towards his brother like a marionette. 

Dean points with his thumb to the receding end of the train.

“Start over? How exactly?”

“Oh, I'm supposed to work that out for you too?” Sam grins, and Dean matches it, holds his hands up in concession.

“Fifty-three it is,” he says, and puts the car into gear.

::

They stop by Bobby's storage locker. Jody had returned all those boxes of books, stacking them in some haphazard order, back after Dean was sucked into the forties. There are more than he remembered; too many for the Impala alone. She must have near broken her back.

Dean drops him off in the next town over and he grabs an old wagon out of a church parking lot, feeling bad but unable to repress the gleeful curl of irony. They load it up and it settles gradually onto its suspension with each box. He probably should have grabbed a truck.

Dean takes off and Sam never manages to catch up with him but the whole way back he gets teasing glimpses of the car, the gleam of her chrome turning corners up ahead, on the long die-cut roads, and he's waiting when Sam pulls into the garage, sitting on her trunk, fiddling with his phone, old sack truck rustled up from the storeroom by the wheel. 

He parks the wagon, ludicrous in its wood-panel glory next to the elegance of the rest of the cars, as Dean pushes himself to his feet and ambles around to the trunk and Sam clutches the steering wheel white-knuckled, riveted: consumed by the need to catch him finally, hold him down and call him to account for the things he does to Sam.

It's midnight by the time they've stowed the boxes. Starving, and scorning as they have their whole lives regular meal times, they make burgers; or, Dean makes burgers, and Sam, who is supposed to be washing lettuce, watches him. The prep area is not as well-lit as it should be, but Dean has been using knives his whole life and he's found their balance quickly, slicing tomatoes and pickles, crushing garlic with the flat of the blade. 

Sam is fairly certain that everything in here had been rusted through when they arrived. When did Dean buy all this stuff?

“I hope those pickles didn't come with the place,” Sam says, and Dean huffs a laugh under his breath. This light is so good to him, golden against his skin and hair, faint shadow of the creases at the corners of his eyes, faint dapple of his freckles. He is relaxed, two fingers into a four-finger drink and moving easily, no frowns pulling him down this evening. 

“What if I wanted Lucky Charms?” Sam asks. The onions smell amazing. The patties, when Dean throws them on the grill, smell even better. He feels drugged.

“You can have Lucky Charms for dinner if you want,” Dean says, and grins at him. “Who's watching? I bought some a while back, they're on the bottom shelf.” 

Dean turns back to the stove, rangehood light moving over his face like memories, all of the Deans of his past here now, and Sam reaches out. 

He puts his hand to Dean's back; his fingertips only, really, lightly against the ridge of his spine and Dean ducks from it, hiding his face, fiddling with the pan. He tries again, with the full press of his hand, palm at the curve of Dean's lower back, and Dean freezes.

He massages a little, into the muscle, and Dean slowly puts his knife down. 

“What happened to do-over?”

Sam doesn't bother answering. There's no such thing for them. All they are is built on the years they've had together, the years they've spent apart. There's no escape, and Dean's not so dumb as to forget that. 

He steps close. Dean, sensing the trap, sidesteps quickly, but Sam is quick too, and shifts his grip to Dean's neck. He likes the look of his hand there, large and capable, fingers disappearing into his hair.

Dean keeps his head down, eyes on the stove. 

“Quit using me to sort your shit out, Sam.” 

“What do you think this is?”

“I know you--”

“Better than anyone, right? Better than I know myself.”

That gets his attention, head snapping up, glaring at Sam, hurt underneath. He pulls at Sam's grip, and Sam lets him go before they're forced to test it.

“Stow it, princess. How many times have I saved your ass? How many times have I saved your _life_?”

Sam laughs and it sounds insane to his own ears, thin and ugly. Dean flinches.

“ _My_ life? Give me a break.”

“What, you'd rather give up? You'd rather be dead?”

“When has it _ever_ mattered what I'd rather?”

Dean rolls his eyes and sneers at him, always putting him in his place, silly childish idealistic Sam.

“Grow up. That's _life_. You see me dancing a jig over here? You think this is what I want?”

“What _do_ you want, Dean?” He says, steamrolling over whatever excuses Dean wants to fortify himself with, and Dean hears it and discards it like it's nothing. He flicks the burners off, face set, and pushes past Sam to the door.

“We both know you're not going anywhere,” Sam calls after him, sinking into horror. 

“Lucky me,” Dean spits bitterly over his shoulder, not even breaking stride and Sam turns from his disappearing back and his hands spasm with the image of plates thrown at the wall, food and jars and knives and whatever he can reach, cast iron trivets off the stovetop. Crashing against the wall, breaking tiles, bringing this place down around his ears; crushed by rock, his bones dust, his spirit ash. 

_Leave, just leave, just go_ , clamouring in his blood, eternal refrain but he is so tired of being a refugee and he has nowhere to go anyway, no place else, no one else in the world that could take him in.

::

And then the next night Dean has him and it's worse than he could have dreamed, on his way back from the showers, caught in the hall as Dean rounds a corner and spots him and stops dead as a heart-attack. Sam averts his eyes, too tired for confrontation, but he has to turn sideways to pass and Dean puts up a hand and fists his t-shirt and they both freeze, staring down at Dean's fingers curled in the cotton over his belly. Sam's hair, still wet, drips cold onto his shoulders. He is barefoot, and they are almost the same height.

“It's okay,” Dean says, voiceless, bearing him into the wall. He's lying. He looks like a man in the path of a train. He looks like he's seen the end of the world.

“No, it's not,” Sam says, scratchy with hysteria, chest crushing under the weight of it, baring his teeth. Dean freezes again, and releases him and starts to step back, and Sam snaps his hand out and grabs him in a fireman grip, fingers striving to meet around his forearm. There will be bruises. 

He pulls Dean back in and puts them cheek to cheek and where to from here Sam has no clue, his muscles locking up, air dying in his lungs. Dean is under his hand, leaning into him. He noses the junction of Sam's neck and shoulder; his lips brush Sam's collarbone and Sam flashes sudden and hot to Dean on his knees. The image nearly cripples him. It's beyond the pale.

“I want it,” Dean breathes into his hair, and Sam groans, twists, full-bodied, finding places where they connect: temple, chest, dick, treading on his brother's shoes. 

Dean's hand hits the small of his back, and holds on, and he swears, makes a filthy noise that Sam echoes like a mantra, gone on the sweet pressure of it, sweatpants thin and no barrier at all this time to the insistence of Dean's dick against his thigh, his own erection jumping at the brush of knuckles along the length of him. Dean's hand. He's lost his grip on Dean's arm and now Dean is setting him free and jerking him off, slow and careful and savouring, turning his wrist, his fingers hitting every point along Sam's dick. Sam bites his lip and still can't suppress a whimper.

“Ah, Sammy,” Dean says, words curling hot and deep and pleased across Sam's skin, down his spine. “I knew it.”

How long has he been wishing this away, Sam wonders, thoughts scattering. Sam's whole life: studying under his eye; swimming. Running. Loading guns.

He groans again and sets his hands on Dean's shoulders, fingers digging into the muscles, feeling them shift with the action of Dean's hand, and says his brother's name. He lips at his earlobe, his neck, trying to bend at the hips to give Dean more space to work but Dean's hand at his back is like iron, immutable, and he stirs, heart pounding as Dean works him faster, thumbing the top of his dick, picking up the wet there. 

Dean tongues at his pulse, sucking, blasting Sam open. His skin is buzzing with it, every place Dean touches him, and he can't move – can't go anywhere. It trawls through him, nets catching on his fear and reckless heart, tearing at them, spiralling up. He starts to shake. He clutches at Dean's jacket and Dean kicks his legs apart a little more.

“I got you, come on. I got you,” Dean murmurs, and he thinks, appallingly, unbidden, of Dad, the black look in his eyes the first time Dean brought him back from running away, trying to disappear into the field behind that shack in Wyoming. His throat closes up and he grimaces and tips his head back, up at the grey unromantic ceiling. He's so close, his legs trembling with it, useless; Dean pants encouragement hot against Sam's neck, the thick smell of them saturating the air, obliterating, and this was always going to happen, this was always here waiting for him and he is a fool, he was a fool to think he had any choice at all, surrender or fight, he has nothing, he is nothing. 

When he comes it stripes Dean's fingers, Dean's shirt. He looks down and sees it, white on faded charcoal, a shirt he's washed countless times. The head of his dick, Dean's hand curved around, obscene. He closes his eyes, chest heaving, mouth still stretched in a grimace, and feels Dean let go.

He can't catch his breath. He bends forward against a sudden lurch of nausea and Dean tries to hold him up but he pushes, and Dean steps back, halting and uncertain. He turns and braces himself on the wall and focuses, fighting light-headedness.

“Sam?” Dean asks, quietly. The fear is setting in.

“It's okay.” He opens his eyes, staring down at the tile. He unlocks his hand from his knee and stands and pulls up his waistband, tucks himself back in. 

“Sam,” Dean rasps, and when Sam looks around he is white-faced, eyes huge, unconsciously wiping his hand on his jeans. His lips are wet. He is still hard. He is a ruin.

“It's okay. It's okay, Dean, I promise,” he says from the centre of some hollow impersonal space, bleached pristine. He gives Dean a careful smile and steps around him and finds himself back in his room with his heart still tripping past its limits and his stomach churning and his hands numb and thoughtless.


	3. Chapter 3

Sam got drunk and hooked up with a guy once, freshman year and blitzed at frat party, a sloppy half-hour of rutting and handjobs on a blow-up mattress in the basement. It had been fine. He didn't remember much of it. They had both passed out, and in the morning Sam had woken up and left for his dorm and got on with his life and he never had to see that guy again. Simon, who had short blond hair and the shoulders of a quarterback.

But this. This is torture. 

He drinks his way through to sleep but it's a long road, mind turning on Dean's hand, his calluses, the pant of his breath. He had touched Sam like there was nothing else in the world. It's damningly familiar, Dean's kamikaze focus, it's nothing new. All that's new is the place it took them, and even that is not so foreign anymore. 

He wakes after maybe two hours' sleep resistant to the need to piss, resistant to the idea of getting up ever again, and then it turns into the nebulous aimless resentment, his old friend. He's going to go out there and Dean will be angry beyond belief but it will fade, and maybe they'll eventually succeed in forgetting it this time, now it's been reciprocated in the cold light of day but forgotten or not it will play out like it always does, and Sam will keep sleeping and waking and losing himself, and Dean will keep slipping away from him without renouncing his claim.

Dean is in the library, and Sam watches him half a second before he enters. He is flipping his phone in his hand, weighing it at every catch, frowning down. Running, then. Sam sighs, and stops at the top of the stairs, leans on the doorway. 

“Just had a call from Charlie,” Dean says, not looking at him, waving his phone at Sam like a talisman. Sam puts the odds at a hundred to one. “She's got a thing happening.... A poltergeist thing. Might take a while.”

Sam presses his lips together and nods. It'll be longer than a week, probably. But he'll be back. Dean, already packed apparently, grabs his duffel from the chair by his side and stands and hesitates a moment, hand working in the straps. His eyes skate across Sam's cheeks, the space around him. He's not angry, Sam realises with a spike of unease.

“Sam,” he says suddenly, wretched, lost, and fear claws at Sam's chest. Sam has heard him like this before, when they are on the point of death and dissolution, when they have razed the earth. This is not the conversation he thought he was having. 

“Dean, wait.” His voice is high with alarm and he steps forward and Dean flinches and bolts and Sam is left absurdly, bewilderingly alone. It takes him a while to grasp the fact. He walks the rooms in a fog, weight of the hill above sucking all the air out of the place. He touches things: Crowley's chains; the silent longwave radio; his brother's photos. He toes the step where his hands murdered Kevin. 

He visits the gun range and the server room and the garage and kitchen and the bathrooms. He passes doors that haven't been opened in sixty years, keys a distant memory.

In the archive rooms are papers and artefacts. They crowd on shelves and stuff filing cabinets and warded boxes, in the vague intuitive order of a cataloguing system that expanded organically. Bobby's library had been the same, but with more reliance on his labyrinthine memory. A simple database would do here, he thinks. Modified Dewey system for the objects. Maybe a handheld document scanner. 

He opens a filing cabinet and leafs through the folders. There are manuscripts and drawings and maps, railroad systems from 1938 and another even older with Dutch all down the Eastern seaboard. The world map has names like Canton and Leningrad. One graphite rubbing shows a mouth stretched open, somewhere between a vampire and a werewolf, Latin text displaced around it. _Trillium/saffron/sknk cbbge_ is noted in ink down the side; _Go To SLEEP_ in a different hand underneath. The paper is thin and translucent, crackling in his hand, brother to a thousand books and parchments that have passed through Sam's fingers over the years.

So long ago they were in here. Lives spent. 

He dumps everything back into the drawer, and heads to the garage.

::

He gets on the road late, and keeps going, steady northward heartbeat across the face of the earth. He stops twice, to piss and for food, raiding a gas station outside of Ellendale for anything fresh, perched on the hood of the wagon forcing down a tasteless apple, moon rising over the wide flat land.

Five miles out from the border he knows it's futile. He sits in a turnout and watches cars saunter by, going on holiday, going home. Trucks blasting, on a mission. He wishes it were snowing, that he could fall asleep now at three am and be carpeted over, disappeared with the world entire. 

He closes his eyes and dreams of running through the woods again, hauling his leaden legs through the grasping shadows in full, desperate flight. He is hunter and hunted: Dean is ahead and behind him. Branches slap and snap across his face, and he wakes with a start to banging on the window. A cop peers through, flashlight handle framing his face. 

He winds down the window, letting in the chill. It's still dark out, an hour before dawn, and the man is lit intermittently by his own flashlight, flickering like a ghost.

“Everything okay, son?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You know you can't sleep here?”

“I didn't mean to.”

“Thought you could make it through, huh?”

“Yes, sir,” Sam says, rubbing at his eyes, scratching at his stubble, his scalp. His fingers catch in his hair. He half expects to find twigs and leaves in there.

“Well, at least you were smart enough not to push it.” The cop sniffs and frowns, shines his light around the interior of the car. Even to Sam, who is acclimated, the car does not smell fresh. “You been drinking?”

“No sir,” Sam says, and is filled with a yearning for the generous light of the bunker. A place to wash his face, to shave. Take off his boots and warm his feet. He can almost smell the fresh coffee. Toast with the peanut butter melting.

“Where are you headed?”

“Kansas.”

The cop frowns again and indicates the road behind them.

“Kansas is that way.”

“I know,” Sam says.

::

By noon he is scraped clean as vellum, as an over-sharpened knife. He pulls into a place off the highway, a nothing motel, neon half gone, as shabby as his past misdeeds and he stops in front of the office with its unpainted eaves and puts the wagon in park and puts his hand on the door handle and finds that he can't get out, can't make his fingers tighten and grip. They are shaking, and he swallows in wordless panic and looks around at the bright air and bright walls and bright people. No one notices him at all.

Another motel: he can't. He's not capable. 

An hour later he detours into Sioux Falls, hurtling past the turn-off to Bobby's, the tug in his chest pulling him sideways strong as ever. He knocks at Jody's door instead and waits on the porch, a minute and more with no answer and he realises it's two in the afternoon. She's probably at work. What is he doing here? It feels like the start of every scene he's seen the aftermath of. An overcast day in suburbia, roadblind monster on the porch.

He turns just as the door wrenches open. Her eyes are wide.

“Jesus Sam, what happened? Is Dean okay?”

“What? No, he's fine.” Sam frowns, shoving his hands in his pockets. She raises her eyebrows and looks him up and down.

“Could have fooled me. You look like roadkill.”

He turns the corner of his mouth down dryly. She's not much up to scratch herself, in a dressing gown, fluffy and green, hair bent and sleepy. She grins and reaches up to hug him, fierce and brief and it's a surprise; it shouldn't be, she's done it before, but bending down to put his arms around her he feels tentative and strange. 

Her place is a lot smaller than the house she had when he first met her, cluttered but tidy, mismatched furniture and rifles mounted over the bookcase, round rug under the kitchen table. It's warm. It suits her.

She's staring at him with a cop's gaze, and he tucks his hair behind his ear, clears his throat. He has no idea what to say. He's not even sure why he's here, and it feels increasingly like a mistake. 

“Sorry I woke you.” 

She waves at him dismissively.

“I was just taking a nap. Late night. Missing kid.”

“You need help?”

“Nah, we found him.”

She pulls a bottle of juice out of the fridge and hands over a glass, drinking herself from the bottle in big thirsty gulps. He leans on the kitchen counter and sips in lieu of talking. 

“I'm taking first shower,” she says, abruptly.

“I don't need--”

“Yes, you do. Then I gotta head back in. Paperwork, all that. You know. Well, I guess you wouldn't.”

“Oh, sure. I'll--” He pushes himself upright, and she cuts him off, pointing a stern finger at him. 

“Don't insult me. You got a bag? I'll be back around nine with some takeout. Help yourself to whatever.”

“If it's no trouble.”

She gives him that look again and Sam ducks his head, heads back to grab his duffel out of the wagon. After she leaves he makes himself a sandwich and does the dishes. He has a shower and cleans the bathroom. He cleans his guns and repacks his bag. He doesn't think about the bunker. He doesn't think about his brother. He keeps his hands busy and doesn't think about anything. 

Jody has a boyfriend, a local teacher, who comes over for dinner and they watch _Lost_ , because Trent is a fanatic and is making her watch from the start. Sam feels like the Hulk, crammed into a dining-room chair as they sit on the sofa. He never watched the show before and he's clueless about what's going on, but after the first time Trent pauses the DVD to explain at length the backstory and characters, convoluted and mystical, he just lets it wash over him, focuses on the cyan water and yellow sand.

“I love stories like this,” Jody tells them, pointing her beer at the screen. “ _Castaway, First Blood_. Using your wiles in the wild.” She grins at him. “I think I overvalue my own survival skills.”

“Trust me, it's about as fun as it looks,” Sam says, and she quirks a _yeah, yeah_ smile at him, and her boyfriend looks confused. Who knows what Jody has told him, but Trent doesn't look at all threatened to have a strange man rock up out of the blue, and when Jody goes for more beer and snacks he even leans forward, elbows on knees, frown creasing his forehead that takes Sam back to every teacher he's ever had who thought they could see through his skin to his parentage, his home life, the demons under his bed.

“Hey man, feel free to tell me to go to hell, but are you all right?”

“Yeah, fine,” Sam says, and clears his throat. “So uh, what do you teach?”

“History,” Trent says, doubt staining his voice.

“Cool,” Sam says, swallowing down a fledgeling spiral of hysteria and it effectively ends the conversation. History. He cannot think of anything worse. 

Jody kisses Trent goodnight outside the front door like Sam's her dad, and makes Sam refuse the bed again, and finally hands over a blanket and leaves him to the sofa. It's a poorer fit somehow than the Impala, his knees aching to be bent so, his whole body restless and sore, ticking slowly through the night. He's a ghost town. Someone built a bypass and now he's emptied out. He's tumbleweeds and dust and a spirit going crazy.

He gives up, digs an old, shredded copy of _Firestarter_ out of Jody's bookshelf and reads the same paragraphs over and over, puts it down when the irony switches to recognition, self-flagellating and pointless. He steals another beer out of her fridge and drinks it standing at the window, staring unblinking out at the impartial moon until it disappears beyond the windowsill and his eyes, dry and creaking, close finally for good when he bends himself back into the sofa. 

When he wakes a couple of hours later his eyes are crusted over and his cheek is wet from drool. It's a Sunday morning and Jody is in the kitchen with a coffee and the paper. She tilts her head towards the coffeepot and he pours himself one, black, sugarless. He trained himself to drink it like this when he was still a kid, easier than having a preference for stuff you couldn't always get, and he's come to prefer it. Dean would always dump sugar and milk in there whether he wanted it or not.

“You were _out_ ,” Jody says, pretending to be impressed, and sets a bowl of cereal in front of him. He hums thanks, and is trapped in the silence as she reads. She looks like she slept poorly as well, missing hours of sleep greying her skin, and here he is lurking in her kitchen with its curtains and its banana fridge magnets, eating her cornflakes. He is the last thing she wants to deal with. 

She sighs and drops the paper.

“Christ, I hate it when kids are involved.”

“What happened?”

“Custody dispute. Dad broke his parole.” She takes a gulp of her coffee and grimaces, dumps it in the sink. “Asshole. Doesn't give a shit about the boy, just wanted to punish his ex.”

“Hey, you got him back. That's what counts.”

She finishes rinsing her mug and turns to him, leaning against the sink, hands on her hips.

“Sam, you can tell me what's wrong.”

Sam laughs, and it's only a little bitter.

“You really don't want to know.”

“You've been out in the wild a long time.”

He shrugs. It wasn't so long ago that Amelia had brought him in, but Jody doesn't know that and maybe he'd never fully come in anyway. As hard as the choice had been, in the end it had been easy. Too easy, odds stacked from the start. It was never really fair to her. To Jess, either.

His eyes sting, and he's over it, so fucking maudlin he could murder himself. He shakes his head clear and looks around for something to fix on. There are photos of her son on the walls, gap-tooth-grin here, arms curled around Jody's neck there.

“Good kid,” Sam croaks, nodding at the pictures. Jody smiles, sad fond twist. It's an unusual combination. Most of the mothers of dead sons he meets are ravaged by grief too fresh, or eaten away as it lingered like a disease. She's done so well.

“He was.” She runs her hand over her face. “You wanna stay another night? Think I can rustle up a proper cot from work. You look like a pretzel.”

“Thanks, but I should get moving,” he says, shaking his head, and she narrows her eyes at him. 

“Whatever happened, you gotta find a place to stop eventually.”

“I just went for a drive.”

She makes a noncommittal noise. It strikes him that maybe she's hoping he'll stay and he hesitates, paralysed, awkward in the realisation that he doesn't want to. He takes up too much room here. He'd lurk like a scavenger, feeding off the fragments of her cases, her life, and dwindle, and die.

“Well, I'm here. You and your clown of a brother should check in more often. With Bobby gone.”

“I know, I'm sorry. I will. We will.”

He tidies his bowl, grabs his bag and gives her another hug.

“Don't lie to me now,” she mutters, arms tightening around his shoulders.

“I promise. Thanks for the couch, Jody. I owe you one.”

She sees him out, leaning on the edge of the open door, shutting herself into the gap. 

“Bet your ass,” she says, and grins at him.

::

He doesn't quite have his tail between his legs but it's close, when he returns to the bunker. But Dean is not there to see him slink in, and the door creaks open into the heavy, still silence of a place abandoned.

No Dean. No Crowley in the dungeon. No Kevin in the library.

But the coffee station and the mugs are clean and ready to use, and the fridge is relatively full, and he cleans off a carrot and sticks it in a tub of yogurt and takes them on a walk around the place, glad that Dean isn't there to mock him. 

He ends up back in the first archive room. The crates of books, not important enough to end up in the main library, carefully sealed against silverfish and termites. Some man of letters before him has carefully indexed them nonetheless. 

This man who had lived here at some point previous had written the catalogue out in a blue fountain pen, titles in swooping cursive lists under the neat isophase capitals of the subject headings, cryptic codes for the locations: _RAKSHASA: Encyclopaedia Ra-Sh: 1:2Ra (internal 5thE); Putana Kī Mauta – Chandrasekar, Jagadish: 3A:5Ch (ed.1912 acq. Cawnpore raid); Devils of the Hindoo – Somerton, James Stephen : 6C:8So (1879 acq. Somerton Estate)._

He slides the drawers back in, enjoying the neat roll of it, remembering visiting as a kid an old monastery library switching over to digital. Squat fat little enclave at the top of a squat fat little hill, two hundred houses outside its walls sprawling across a valley floor. Inside, one of the librarians, an older guy – well maybe ten, fifteen years older than them, but at seventeen that seemed old enough to render a librarian vaguely soft and nebbish and cardiganed – had flicked his fingers along the edges of the cards like a magician. Showing off, Sam had felt, in the presence of Dean.

There were rumours about this guy, Sam remembers betting himself. Dean had asked where the vending machines were, and if the Town Hall had a local paper archive, for his nerdy kid brother, and he had turned it on, of course. Dean was feeling good in those days and it had been on all the time. He'd turned his smile on this guy and cracked him like an egg. 

Sam, a couple of months away from Stanford, couldn't blame the guy. He'd lived with it his whole life. He knew. Trapped in a monastery, century-old brick and older paper, guardian of abstract pasts, dead people's words. No wonder he'd looked at Dean like Dean was life itself.

::

He starts in the coolroom and at the back finds box upon box of stockpiled cans with the labels peeled off or fading, mysteries lost to time. He opens one out of dire curiosity. Inside is a brown slurry, thankfully odorless. Fruit, maybe. He hauls them out, splinter by splinter, and takes them to a dump in Abeline.

In the fourth archive room he finds the research of a former resident, protective symbols pulled out of the _Avestra_ that activate only when visible, and he paints them on the walls of the library and control room in UV paint, jury-rigging lights into a few of the sconces, lines leading clumsily to a switch by the arch. 

Up on the ladder he notices a bookshelf out of true; pressing a latch underneath one of the shelves he finds behind it a room barely larger than his arm span. Stacked in a corner are several boxes, foot-wide cubes in rosewood and mahogany, enamel lids in deep jewel tones, filigree winding about in symbols he doesn't recognise. They are heavy; or their contents are, and he can't find a way to open them.

He sends a picture to Cas, to see if they're warded or cursed, and an hour later welcomes him back through the door, slapping his back, mouth stretching into a grin like his cheeks are cracking, unused. He brings him down and shows him the hidden room, that he's filled with blankets, a bookshelf made out of crates, the Coleman he's hung. 

“It's very nice,” Cas says, carefully, and turns back to the boxes on the library table, tracing his fingers across the signs, eyes closed, frowning. “It's a good thing you called me. I don't know if I could bring you back from complete disintegration.” 

While Sam absorbs this tidbit Cas shifts his fingers along the side of the box and the lid springs open. Inside are discs stamped with the Aquarian star, shining in the overhead light. Sam picks one up and turns it over, mouth dry. Just grandpappy Winchester and his buddies, quietly hoarding a ransom of silver.

Sam fetches bags and canisters and anything he can find that will hold the metal while Cas opens the rest of the boxes, careful and precise, like he doesn't trust himself to get it right, worn down and abraded. Sam winces in guilt. Wrapped up in his own shit, as usual. Anything could have happened in the last week and he wouldn't have a clue. He hasn't checked his alerts for Gadreel or Metatron once since he's returned.

“Hey, how are you going out there?”

Cas puts the last box down and rests his hand on Sam's shoulder, uncomfortably strong. Sam thinks it's meant to be reassuring.

“We will find them, Sam. Increasingly I hear humans in their presence. They are moving out into the world. It won't be long.”

“Sure, of course,” Sam nods, and then runs cold. “Wait, you still hear people?”

Cas frowns.

“I am an angel.”

“Is that...constant? Or do you have to tune in?”

“I could describe it,” Cas says, delicately; apparently it would be a futile exercise. “Why?”

He doesn't know what else he expected. His entire life has been a buffet, open 24/7 to whoever wanted a taste.

One of the boxes is full of gold instead of silver. He picks up a disc and runs his fingers across the star stamped there. The silver is more beautiful, stronger, more lethal. He can't think of anything you can kill with gold; it must be here in preparation for some kind of dystopian scenario, Ragnarok or the Rapture or whatever the Men of Letters had up their sleeves.

He dumps a handful in an old cookie tin and Cas tilts his head.

“I have existed for many thousands of years. I have seen many things beyond the scope of your imagining.”

“Cas,” he begs. “Could you just not listen in on us?”

“But then who will hear your prayers?”

Sam blinks, derailed. He has not prayed since his confession. He has certainly not addressed their absentee God since his escape from Gadreel. Christ, what is there left to say?

“I’m an angel, Sam. I can no more turn off my hearing than you can turn off your metabolism.”

“Oh, good,” Sam says. “Great.” 

“I will try to give you privacy, as you would recognise it. One does not always have to be what one has been.” He ducks his head and turns, walks the length of the room, pausing every now and then to examine a book or an artefact. He picks up the katana, Dean's favourite, and puts it back. When he speaks he is far enough away that his voice echoes faintly on its way down to Sam. “At least I wish to believe so. My brothers and sisters continue to refuse emancipation.”

“They want to feel safe again,” Sam says, gently.

“There's no such thing on Earth.”

“Are you sure you're okay?” Sam asks, but Cas brushes his concerns away, and makes his excuses, and at the door he reaches out and hugs Sam, like that's what they do now. Those three days in a motel on the Tennessee border, healing him from Gadreel, Cas had laid hands on him regularly, and by the end his touch had been warm and dry and peaceful. In that motel they had eaten together, and watched _Jeopardy!_ together, and he had asked Cas about Jimmy Novak, what Cas had done for him, what dreams had been given him, but Jimmy has been gone for some time now apparently. The reward for saying yes. 

Sam would like to say yes to something, one day, if oblivion were not the result. But no: no to the life, no to his family, his destiny. No to Dean.

“What does he pray for?” Sam asks, as Cas steps outside, and Cas squints at him and shakes his head admonishingly.

::

His phone rings at two am and he sits with a gasp and answers mindlessly, pulled out of a dream of Kevin in the pit, clawing for him as he floats out of reach of rescue, but Kevin keeps snatching his hands from Sam's grasp, his eyes black with hate.

“Yeah,” he grunts, and gets nothing. He pulls back and squints at the display. His heart kicks into gear. “Dean? Where are you? Are you okay?”

Dean snorts. He's drunk. A familiar white noise fills Sam's ear.

“Are you driving? Pull over at least.” 

“I've driven drunk more times than you've had hot breakfasts.”

“That's supposed to make me feel better?”

Dean sighs, ever fucking persecuted, and there's a pause, the crunch of gravel.

“Happy now?”

“Are you okay?”

“Look, shut up. I just gotta. Sam.” There's a silence so long Sam wonders if he's passed out. It's pitch black. He forgot to leave the hall light on last night and he can't bring himself to reach for the lamp, to have anything else in the room with him except Dean. “I should never have--” 

“What?”

“Pick something.” There is another long silence, and when he finally speaks it's quiet and low, bravado reached for in vain. “How long have you known?”

It's so far from what Sam was expecting that his heart skyrockets and his skin prickles, sweat or goosebumps. It's a minute before he can speak.

“Christ, Dean. I didn't know. Not really.”

“You did know, and you used it against me, and fuck you for that, by the way.”

Sam shakes his head. He's been trying not to think about the corridor, but it wasn't anything he did on purpose, he knows that much.

“It just happened.”

“Oh, it just happened.” Dean mocks. “In Philly, it just happened?”

Sam sits up properly, gets his feet on the ground, braces his elbows on his knees, his forehead on his thumb and index. He can't answer that. Not at such close range, in the dark, Dean's breath in his ear. He should be there in the car, sidelong and faithful, instead of the distant fuckup he is. But if Sam were a good man he wouldn't blame Dean for needing him so consumingly. If Sam were a good man he wouldn't be the root cause of this goddamn fiasco anyway. He wouldn't have done what he did, been what he'd been. 

“The whole time?” Dean says, hoarse enough to make Sam's throat close over in sympathy. “For you?”

“No.” It tastes like a lie. “But.”

Dean grunts assent and it hits Sam like a truck. Every day he realises more the endless inescapable reach of it, fading in and out through the pageantry of his life. Who could have imagined, though? That such a part of him had been treading steadily this path every minute, every day, unknowing. 

Dean drinks something, long gulps. A can, tinny and empty when it hits the passenger footwell. His voice is a hollow slur.

“Did I hurt you?”

“Dean, no,” Sam says, aghast, sick to his stomach. 

“Don't fucking lie to me.”

“No. You could never. That way.”

Dean makes a noise that Sam can't follow, bit-off and wounded, and it's killing him, this staticy connection, he's sitting on his bed in his room and Dean is out there somewhere under the rain maybe, under the stars certainly, so far away. He can picture it, Dean in the silver light, phone pressed to his cheek, breathing coarse in his ear until the distance is too great to bear. Where the hell is he going? Doesn't he know that he is the only thing Sam has?

“I'm no good, Sammy,” Dean says, and there, that's something they can both choke on nicely.

“How convenient,” Sam snaps, and hangs up.

::

He wakes in the morning alone in the bunker, and sleeps alone that night, and wakes alone again. Evidently Dean hadn't been on his way home. Maybe he is off finding a way to live without his brother, making himself anew again with a woman and son or a monster friend. It's for the best, he thinks. He can't remember anymore how they had ever made it work, side-by-side, drinking and laughing and hunting. It was all a dream. Awake, it is not something that can be borne by either of them.

If Dean doesn't come back he might die alone in here. He might slip in the showers. The ventilation might fail and he'll go peacefully in his sleep. Some other Men-of-Letters-imprisoned monster might emerge to seek its revenge.

If Dean doesn't come back, he might ask Cas move in, except Cas would always want to see Dean. But there would be space for someone else; six rooms that might once have been bedrooms, and long bunkless dormitory that's full of boxed and expired rations and outdated survival gear: WWI-era gas masks, fluoride pills, potassium iodide. This place has capacity, potential. It can accommodate. Ash would have lived well in here, granting a satellite installation, and an upgraded server room. 

There are no noises down here. Not the drone of highway traffic, seeping under countless motel doors; not the growl of an engine, or the white noise of the suburbs; not the bass thuds of his brother's music or cooking finding him down the repeating endless hallways. Walking around with the place unoccupied he is overcome by the cavernous spaces of the library, the double-height of the war room, the echoing showers, the garage with its empty bay. 

In the pit there were spaces at times that felt similar: boundless and senseless. He would find himself in them, weight in his body but unable to fix on anything. Those spaces had been painless but they were almost worse than the others: to move without reference or resistance, nothing to push against, as he had been pushing his entire existence; nothing to make himself against. 

He stands and breathes, heel of his hand to the centre of his ribs, pushing to feel the expansion of his lungs, to know that he can breathe. He works out until he burns, muscles liquid with pain. He takes books into the nooks and crannies he finds hiding between rooms; he spends a lot of time in the hidden alcove, never quite brave enough to shut the bookshelf behind him. He unearths a sketched sigil against angel possession that looks unlikely to work, but he puts it aside anyway for Cas to check. He calls Jody to see how she's going with Trent, and _Lost_. 

He eats when he remembers, mechanically, staring at the wall or a book or his laptop, and he stays, and stays, unravelling through the rooms that echo hollow and graceless around him.

::

He is knee-deep sorting the journals of one Mavis Wells, wife and secretary and apparently potions master of the Men of Letters, when his second phone rings in the bedroom, his slightly less private number, strident and foreign bouncing fifty feet off tile down the corridor and around a corner; it takes him too long to register it and it rings out twice while he's still limping down, leg gone dead from being sat on at the wrong angle, and then starts up again, jumping in his hand as he stares down at the unfamiliar number.

“Yeah?”

“Garth gave me this number,” a man says, sullen, abrupt.

“Okay.”

“I need some information.”

“Okay,” Sam says, sitting on the bed, massaging feeling back into his calf. His eyes are gritty, his head swollen with impending headache, and he checks his watch and realises that he's half a day out of whack: two pm now, and he's been up for about sixteen hours. It's so easy to lose track. He should get more sun. 

“It's Winchester, isn't it?”

“Who's asking?” On the phone: another long pause; a curse word under the breath. 

“Look, I got a situation here.” The guy heaves a sigh. Sam was gone for a year and has been mostly invisible since, and still they know he's bad news. “A dragon situation. I heard you have a blade.”

“You may have heard right,” Sam says. In fact he saw it only a couple of days ago, jumbled into a chest with a bunch of other tossed-away trivia: oddly-shaped manacles, a broken stiletto of quartz. Dean must have stashed it there; either that or the Men of Letters had their own. "Where are you?”

“Oklahoma. Broken Arrow. Bar on Elm, off the turnpike”

“I'll be there in six.”

“Sooner is better,” says the guy, curt, and hangs up. Sam texts Garth to verify and digs up the blade and is on the road in half an hour. Dean would be so pissed if he knew. It's like he's glaring at Sam the whole drive south, and Sam kind of enjoys the feeling, spreading his wings under Dean's disapproving eye.

The bar is dark and dingy, a point in the guy's favour. Sam's never seen him before. He is surly, obviously unhappy to be there, and barely masks a flinch when Sam drops in the chair opposite him.

“You going after this thing by yourself?” He asks, and the guy jumps, suspicious.

“Why?” He drops a hand underneath the table, which is frankly just plain rude. Sam hates having guns pointed at his junk.

“What's your name?”

“Abe.”

“I'm guessing you never hunted a dragon before.”

“Oh, and you have?”

“How do you think I got this?” He brushes back his jacket to show the blade. “Want a hand, Abe?”

Abe fishes a binder out of the bag by his feet, photocopied files showing a series of burned-out men and women, their eyes black holes, mouths gaping open, teeth and tongues charred wastelands. Sam touches his fingers to the sockets and looks up sharply, frowning. Abe might be a few years older than Dean, and he might be grizzled and scarred, but he's missed this by a mile.

“This isn't a dragon, this is an angel. And something's wrong with it, to be burning through so many bodies.” 

“What?” Abe asks, perplexed, but Sam isn't listening. 

Gadreel had been ejected before he could fully restore himself, and he'd even left a part of himself behind. His gorge rises. In the next state over the whole time. He looks at Abe again, who is several shades paler under his stubble, but if he's made it to this age he must have a good set of reflexes, workable instincts.

“You good for this?”

“I guess, sure.”

He's not sure, and it would worry Sam but Abe has done good tracking work, narrowed it down to a square mile on the industrial side, and Sam is flying high on lack of sleep and adrenaline and he has an angel blade in the trunk and he can taste it, blood and accusations and injustice heavy on his tongue, his hands in righteous fury around Gadreel's neck: payback, vengeance, and then maybe, finally, rest.

He slams the binder shut and stands.

“We're gonna finish this, Abe. You and me.” Abe looks up, eyes narrowed against the overhead lights, searching his face, and Sam grabs his shoulder, leans down and grins at him. “We're gonna finish it.”

::

But it’s not Gadreel.

His heart sinks; his missed night of sleep hits him all at once. She's nothing, unknown to him and half dead anyway, lying in the parking lot in a nest of old rags: worn down and wingless, rejected by the new order. 

He hands Abe the holy oil and crouches by her feet, curling his nose at the smell of burning. She looks him up and down, and a spasm of pain locks her muscles, deforms her face. 

“Gadreel. Where can I find him?”

“Gadreel is not for you,” she gasps. “He will be collected by his fate.”

“You’re looking at it.” He lifts the angel blade to where she can see it and turns it in the light. “Where can I find him?”

She bares her teeth at him. Her gums are bleeding, and he sighs, sunk with a weary kind of sorrow. These angels. All they want is a General. They have no imagination.

“What's your name?” He asks, and she sneers again.

“My name was given to me by the _Father_.” Her eyes are bright and feral and her hands clutch in the rags, clinging fervently to whatever she feels was conveyed to her with that word, so long ago. Her breathing is laboured, desperate. He leans in.

“You think you're going to be able to get a new vessel, like you are? You're done. How long do you think you've got?”

She shrugs, and under the movement kicks her leg out lightning fast and knocks him to the ground. He sees Abe fly backwards twenty feet. The oil shatters.

She is on him before he can recover, her own blade out of nowhere against his neck, dipping close, eyes ranging over his face greedily.

“The abomination,” she coos, blood flecking her lips, breath like rotten meat. “This has been an unexpected boon.”

“Oh, you've heard of me,” he says, barely able to draw the breath for it, vision greying.

She nods. There is some grace yet in the bend of her neck, he thinks madly. She is only a visitor here.

“You are known to us,” she says, and smiles her red smile, and sets the point of the blade against his chest and pushes. It goes in slowly, grating against his collarbone and a howl is torn out of him, his neck snapping back, bashing his head on the asphalt and the searing pain of it cuts in, clearing him out. He grits his teeth and opens his eyes. She is so close he doesn't have to lift his voice above a whisper. 

“Last chance.”

“You forget what I am, maggot,” she says, and pulls back, arm raised, and Sam brings his hand around clutching a broken brick and takes her across the brow, caving in one eye socket with a sick meaty thud. She stabs down wildly and he rolls, to the left and onto his feet, kicking her in the face to keep her blind, breaking her wrist with his boot and snatching the blade. When he stabs her he stares into her remaining eye and gets the full blaze of it, the insanity, the distance from home.

Abe helps him up, eyes wide, and he sits Sam on the hood of his car and fetches his first aid kit from the trunk, neatly stocked and ordered. He presses wadding to the hole on Sam's chest, hands tentative. 

“Are you gonna be okay?”

Sam nods. It's not pumping blood; she didn't get any arteries. 

“Had worse.” He holds the cotton to his chest while Abe tapes it down. It's barely even a field dressing and Abe looks at it sceptically, hands him a couple of pills to dry swallow.

“You got someone to look at this? You got a brother, right?”

“Yeah, this'll do until I get back,” Sam says, and makes his tone final, and stands, but Abe still walks him to the wagon, hand hovering near his elbow. He even opens the door and leans on it as Sam gets in, hesitating. Sam closes his eyes a second and breathes deep and wills him to let it go.

“Are they all like that?”

“Not all.” Sam sighs. “Most. They're soldiers. What else can they do?” 

“Don't ask me, my gig is ghosts. I thought a dragon was the big leagues,” Abe says, and Sam shrugs and immediately regrets it, muscles and tendons pulling, pain spiking. He grits his teeth. 

“Ghosts are the same. Trapped in what they used to be.” 

He gives Abe the blade to keep, and shakes his hand stiltedly through the car window, and ten miles down the road he pulls over, hands shaking too hard to hold the wheel securely, breath coming fast, sweat in his eyes and he's in danger, he knows he is, circling the drain, and he has no clue, he has looked in every book and he has killed what he is supposed to kill and he has traded what he is supposed to trade, bargaining his life and soul and the people around him to get here and still it's not enough, _still_ , to make him safe and whole and strong.

::

Jody somehow knows to send him to Junction City, to a retired GP with a weathered face and a two-room flat at the end of an alley, who sews him up. Her hands are strong and capable and utterly wrong.

She doesn't have a local anaesthetic in her home kit, so she gives him morphine to get him through cutting off his tee and the flushing of the wound, the antibiotic injections, the needle. Not his usual painkiller, and when it hits he sags back into the kitchen chair, vinyl scratching at his bare back. His toes feel warm. He thinks fuzzily of his brother, who has just shot a werewolf maybe or exorcised a demon, could be any number of a hundred things he was putting himself in the eye of right now. 

He shakes his head and tries to focus, fixing on her moustache hairs, grey and bristly this close. He should grow his beard. He's in mourning. The world should know. 

“Stay still,” she snaps, closing a stitch, skin tugging in that weird way, almost pleasurable at this level of dissociation. 

“Dean doesn't pull like that.” He is mushy-mouthed, tongue resistant to Dean's name.

“I give a shit.”

“Did you retire because your patients all hate you?”

“I didn't retire, I got fucking done,” she says, and leans back with a sigh, swabbing the blood. “There you go.”

She dumps the swabs and her gloves in the bin and next thing has drained a drink and has poured two more, pressing one into his good hand. An inch of cheap whiskey, he can tell that much just by looking at it. He sips it while she bandages him up and tosses him his flannel and jacket. He stares at them a while, unsure exactly how to put them on. Blood stiffens the fabric all down the front.

“You got a lot of scars, kid,” she says, and eases his bad side into the sleeve, bringing the rest around his back to bend his other arm in. 

“Yup.”

She hitches him up and over to the couch. His knees won't lock, and he collapses back into the cushions when she lets him go. He doesn't remember if she told him her name, and now he's too embarrassed to ask.

They are quiet for a long time, and Sam sips the rest of his drink, mind floating hazily along his scars, visible and invisible.

“How's Bobby anyway?” She asks, resentfully, darkness at the corners of her mouth. 

He peers at her. At some point she turned off the main light and the lamp makes everything brown and muddy. She's fading on him. 

“He's dead.”

“Oh, for fuck's sake,” she says, and pulls back into shadow, shocked, voice bright and broken with tears, and he's fading himself, head spinning, sinking into a stranger's dreadful orange couch and where's Bobby to save him, where's Riot, where's Amelia, Ruby, where's his fucking place gone, so far away from him and ungraspable, abandoning him to his long slow dissolve through the night.


	4. Chapter 4

He wakes uncomfortably, slumped on the couch with a crashing headache and throbbing pain in his chest that radiates down his arm, heats his cheek. In front of his eyes is a small orange prescription bottle and he squints and fumblingly gets it open, tips a couple of pills out.

Movement at the table catches his eye and for a second he thinks Dean is there, that she's summoned him and he's come for Sam but it's just the doctor herself, Jack in hand. She waves it and he shakes his head.

“Water,” he croaks, and she draws a glass from the kitchen tap, hands it over. He downs the pills and lets his head sink back, waiting for the pain to settle. The minutes spin out.

“What time is it?”

“About ten. Am.” She clears her throat. “You gotta go.”

“Yeah,” he says, and clenches his jaw around it, starts marshalling his will. All his joints are rusted closed.

“You got antibiotics at home?”

“Yeah.”

“Take them or it's gonna clean you out from the inside,” she says, and he can't help the puff of a laugh that escapes him. Good luck to the infection, finding anything in there to clean out. 

She crosses her arms and juts out her chin. 

“I took a fifty out of your wallet for the meds.”

Sam nods. She's solid but he's still far bigger than her and he doesn't need a whole hand to count the people who have tried to steal from him in the past. He must look about as threatening as he did when Dean carried him out of a house thirty years ago. 

“That's fine. Thanks for your help.”

He levers himself to his feet and gets them solid underneath him, pressing his toes into the ground until he stops swaying. He drives the backroads home, at half-speed, pulling over every hour to let the nausea pass, and when he is finally inside it's all the same, every wall, every book, his bed, Dean's room. No one has come and gone. 

“Looks like it's just us,” he says, to the mirror above Dean's dresser, and his other self parrots the words without understanding them, staring out with foreign angles to his face and dark greasy hair and stubble like bruises on whitewashed skin.

::

A week later Sam is on the phone to Garth, and passing by the archway to the war room he looks up and Dean is there, standing tall and whole on the landing, duffel slung over his shoulder; at the sight of him Sam loses his mind and his place in the conversation.

He's juggling the phone and three books on Romanian lore, and with this blessed excuse to hand he gives Dean an impersonal nod and gets one in return. Sam is able to surveil him though, take in the nearly-healed gash at his temple, measure his frown, the tightness to his lips, his narrowed eyes searching like he's expecting to see the place has transformed in some way while he was gone.

Maybe it looks like Sam never left, never tried. Maybe it looks like Sam has been here the whole time, waiting, desperate and cowardly.

Dean lingers in the library a moment, like he doesn't want to surrender the main rooms this early in the game, but Sam is blithe and busy, turning pages, reading passages to Garth, deaf to his responses; and at some point during these rhubarb antics Dean disappears down the side and to his room, and doesn't come out until night.

Sam is staring into the fridge when he emerges, trying to figure out how to make the canned soup heating on the stove more palatable. Milk will make it richer; pasta more filling. He looks up over the fridge door to see Dean paused on the top step. Busted, Dean starts down like he'd never stopped. 

“Milk or spirals?” He asks.

“Spirals,” Dean says, warily, and Sam nods and watches him fold his arms and set a hip on the counter for half a second before pushing off and fixing himself a drink. He takes a seat close by the wall and leans back, feet up on the next stool. Sam busies himself likewise, heading for the shelves. He ought to tidy this place up. Dean had left it organised by can types, by foodstuff, new packets at the back, old packets at the front. Sam has not been so diligent. The pasta is open, lying out on the shelf. 

“When did we open this?” He says, peering in to it. He senses Dean shrug behind him. There are no obvious bites or droppings, so he dumps them in the pot and stirs them down. 

“How's Charlie?” he asks, eventually, at a complete loss. 

“Fine,” says Dean, into the rim of his glass. He's lying, and it's a dumb and desperate lie, and they both know it. She would have told them if she was back. She would have told Sam.

“Where did you go?”

“Not far. Helped Cas on a thing.”

“How was it?”

“What do you care, Sam?”

Sam shrugs, eyes on the soup.

“Where did _you_ go?”

“What makes you think I went somewhere?”

Dean gives him a flat, disbelieving look. Under the fluorescents Sam can see the time on his face; creases under his eyes, cheeks a little lower. He had never imagined Dean could look like this: a man getting older. Like everything else, it suits him. 

Sam opens his mouth, but nothing comes out. He himself some mornings can barely believe he came back at all, let alone twice. Better to believe he never left. Easier to believe it in the face of Dean, who even in his scepticism, his roadworn exhaustion, his face marked up God knows how, is something few people in the world have ever said no to. 

They eat together at the dining table. Sam has his laptop open, protection for them both, and they're quiet but it's not the kind of silence Sam had feared, deathly and lonely and beyond repair. 

So much of his life lived across the table from Dean. Always, always, the mundane homilic repetition of it, something like what Dad had wanted for Mom and himself. The only fantasy life Sam can have for his parents looks like how he had lived with Jess. Study, friends, companionship. Sunday afternoons, dozing on the couch while she painted. Childless. 

Those comforts, like his father's, had been false in the end, of course, and his pretty little interlude taken. There had been a true life waiting all along, and he is too tired right now to shame himself for being relieved to be back in it.

He's not forgiven, he can tell that much; but they are in a sparse and lukewarm truce, careful with their words, brushing by each other in the halls, eyes averted, hearts spiking. His days are dotted by the swiss-cheese absence of his brother, always slipping out of rooms and around corners. And Sam plays his own games of hide and seek, with Dean, with his courage. Back to ruining it a little more each day, dragging out the only thing he has into its long glacial death. 

It cannot last, and it doesn't.

“Are you even looking for Gadreel?” Dean accuses him one day while Sam cleans his guns, spreading them out across the map table in the war room.

“Why would you ask that?”

Dean raises his eyebrows, indicates the room, Sam's grease-stained hands.

“Doesn't seem like you're trying too hard.”

“I've done everything I can do. We need new intel.”

Dean paces, flicking broken switches up and down, frowning. 

“Well is there anything else out there I can shoot to death?”

“I'm not your research monkey Dean.” Sam grits his teeth, floored to find himself still fighting, for equilibrium or space or who even knew anymore. He only just got Dean back. What has he done. What is it that can knot him like this, make him lock his own doors, make him cuff his own wrists. 

“It's not going to be like it was,” Dean says, abruptly, turning to face him, defiant, and Sam tips his head back and nearly cries with the injustice of it. He doesn't know any more how to change it. He's tried everything. He couldn't survive away. He couldn't survive with. The only time he's been happy in years it turned out there was an angel inside him and he doesn't know how he made it through, and now they are right back in it, another of the infinite overtures of Sam getting it wrong and screwing it up and getting it wrong again. 

Dean eyes him, withheld and careful, shuttered look on his face that Sam's never seen before and like shaking off a blindfold he blinks and it's Dean in front of him, an actual person and this is something, he thinks, he needs to nail it down, that there is a Dean beyond his Dean, the Dean that had him from the beginning and forever, and maybe some day he can discard the latter, he has done his best to do that, but his hands will always be reaching for the former, his life will always be in pursuit of that form; whether he catches it or not, this is it for him, this is everything. 

He knows that now.

::

He takes himself away for the rest of the day, finds places that can be his own, at least temporarily: he takes his laptop into the archive room and spends an hour laboriously transferring the catalogue to a database; he walks the perimeter of the power station, clearing debris from the ventilation shafts; he callously steams up the bathroom with a long shower, stretching tall and luxurious under the water, one of the only shower alcoves of his life that's fit him, and then does battle with the mirror while he shaves.

“What the fuck is that?” Dean says from behind him, black queasy shock soaking his voice, and Sam jumps and refocuses his eyes to see him in the doorway, fingers clutched around the handle. His eyes are fixed on Sam's chest in the mirror, and Sam flushes against his will. He's only wearing sweatpants. He can feel Dean's gaze like a brand, overlaying the scar. The stitches are a week gone, leaving the scar a neat puckered pink. The doc had done a good job though, and it's going to be about the same as most of his scars.

“It's fine,” he says, and finishes his shave, quick and rough. 

“What happened?”

“Angel,” Sam says, and with his face hidden in his hands as he rinses he considers elaborating on his mistake, getting too close, letting her sweep his feet. He can just imagine Dean's reaction.

“Why didn't – you could have called Cas.”

“He's busy,” Sam shrugs, turning to face him. Dean's eyes flick down again, and Sam's stomach flops and he spins away for his shirt. Dean is six feet distant but the room is too close for this, air still thick and humid from his shower.

“Sam, how can you think--” Dean says, and shakes his head like he's clearing it. “By yourself?”

“Another hunter.”

“Is that how it's gonna be now?” 

“No time soon,” he says, incredulous. His scar still aches every night, sending minor shockwaves to his shoulder, interfering with his exercise. Dean nods and seems to collapse into exhaustion, rubbing his hand across his face, muttering.

“You're gonna kill me.”

“No. I'm not.”

“Well, then, I'm gonna kill you,” Dean says, sarcastic, torn open, and Sam steps forward, clenching his fists, looming, heart-rate rising in the throb of his scar. 

“Let me spell it out for you Dean. My life is _mine_. It's my own.”

Dean holds up his hands, pantomime, _I was just joking Sammy,_ on the verge of fleeing, and Sam stops a foot away. Like Dean can talk, with his own new scar. He reaches out and taps it, eyebrow raised, and Dean is riveted, eyes huge. His voice is coarse, a whisper.

“Where does that leave me?” 

Sam lets a long breath out, not realising he'd been holding it.

“Dean,” he says, and is mildly surprised at the gentleness of his own voice. “Where do you think?”

Dean tips his head back in a small, sour laugh, and reverses through the doorway and disappears.

::

He has been trying to keep his clothes off the floor, but they just pile up on the chair he dragged in for this very purpose. He doesn't really understand why it was so easy to do chores with Jess and Amelia. Here he has to push himself, and in the effort fires up more resentments, as he blinks and finds himself once again Dean's little brother, babied and lazy.

If he doesn't get on top of this he may as well be dead.

So he piles up his arms with washing and in a fit of reconciliation stops by Dean's room to grab his stuff too. It may as well be his, these clothes are so familiar to him. The newest are the flannels Dean bought at a K-Mart in bulk a few months ago. These have softened with use, but held up better than most of their clothes, all of which are uniformly cheap and fragile.

Stuffing them into the machine, a giant old industrial effort that bangs like mortar shells every revolution, he realises that these shirts have been put in drawers instead of duffels; some have even been left behind, exceeding what was necessary for the trip out, skulking in their rooms, awaiting their return. 

When he pulls them out of the dryer he can't remember which are his and which are Dean's without holding them up to his shoulders. The first half of Sam's life was lived in hand-me-downs, never anything that was his pure and simple. How glad he had been to grow, to require, unequivocally, his own space, his own first-run clothes. And no little part of it had been that awful year, sixteen and reaching the limits of Dean's jeans and shirts within weeks of a new batch descending. 

Fitting so neatly in Dean's old clothes would defeat him for days, until his own smell replaced Dean's and his wrists emerged once again from the cuffs, mind wandering during science class unbidden and terrifying to the way Dean's t-shirts stretched around his biceps; shrugging off Dean's touch in its oppressive variety, every day ducking from under his hand on Sam's shoulder welcoming him home, or giving him indian burns, or hip-checking him into post-boxes and utility poles as they walked long empty streets; desperately suppressing erections in the backseat of the car.

He rubs the flannel between thumb and finger. He could wear Dean's clothes now, if he wanted to, and if Dean didn't see him and mock him into an early grave. He could jerk off in the back seat of the Impala morning noon and night if he wanted to. He could let Dean touch him.

He dumps the clothes into the basket.

In the library Dean has his knives laid out, and his stones and a polishing cloth, and he works carefully, but with a markedly casual air. The knife he is working on is long and fine, almost a dagger, slightly curved and etched with symbols. Sam jerks to a halt, spirit plummeting with recognition.

“Last time I saw that it was at Bobby's.”

Dean lifts his head and stares at him bluntly, and Sam, paralysed, can't ask the question. Why did you go to that husk of a place, Dean? Why did you go alone? He thinks of Dean there: sleeping in the car, perhaps, or on the ground in the far shed. Scruffing through the ashes. Last time he was there they'd caught Crowley, two years after the fact and still with that lingering vicious smell settled over it. 

“Shit or get off the pot, Sam.”

“Huh?”

Dean huffs a breath through his nose, and sets down his knives. 

“Come in and act like a normal human being, if you even can, or leave. And blink once or twice for Christ's sake, your eyeballs are gonna fall out.”

Sam's lips quirk despite himself and he sits cautiously, picks up the cloth.

“Good. Do something useful for once,” Dean grumbles, and pushes a couple of knives and a stone across the table.

“I should get mine out,” Sam says, and Dean snorts. Sam rolls his eyes. They work in silence for a handful of minutes.

“I mean it though.” Dean is quiet. “Quit staring at me all the time.”

Sam shifts.

“I don't.”

“Now who's a liar.”

Sam looks up, stomach lurching. Back in the motel again, outside Philly; that has to be what he means. He remembers it. He thinks about it maybe, and he's still here. 

Dean is impassive, head down, focusing on his work. 

“Don't tell me what to do.”

“Seriously?” Dean says, exasperated, like he's just asked for a second banana split, and Sam pinches his mouth to stop a smile. “I'm not joking around about this.”

“I know.”

“Do you? Because your recent behaviour doesn't exactly fill me with confidence, Sam.”

“Yeah, well, it takes two to tango.”

“If you think that's tangoing you're doing it wrong,” Dean says, and Sam isn't looking at him, he's looking at his hands, but he knows Dean hiding amusement when he hears it, and he's struck dumb by this unlooked-for armistice, undreamed of, that Dean could forgive him, could forgive himself even.

Afterwards they take a couple of drinks into Sam's room and blast through the rest of season two of _Game of Thrones_. Dean falls asleep before the credits finish rolling, lolling sideways on the couch, mouth slack, limbs heavy. 

Sam plucks the glass from his hand and throws a blanket over him and sinks on his bed, falls asleep a scant three feet from his brother, like he's supposed to, like he always has. When he wakes he feels rested for the first time since Gadreel left him, but the couch is cold, blanket folded neatly, and it's lonely, he's so fucking ceaselessly lonely to be in this place and have Dean with him but not, to have him fading in and out like a spirit, it's too much to ask of anyone.

::

He leaves himself, heads into Yankton for ammo. He's in the wagon, devoid of his brother's tapes, and he stuggles to find the right music to play; ends up switching between PBS and a classic rock station, trying to distract himself from the sinking feeling in his chest that if another Henrikson started chasing them they'd be able to figure out exactly where Winchester HQ was. How many times had Dad warned them against being the centre of a circle? Ad nauseum. But when had they ever stayed in one place this long?

Next time he'll make it an overnighter.

He picks up a passenger on the way back, it turns out, when he drives into the garage and hears a howl from the backseat. He slams on the brakes and in his rearview Crowley appears, bouncing off an invisible wall, the bounds of the building, rolling on his ass. Sam can hear him cursing from inside the car. He gets to his feet and brushes himself down and looks behind him, examining the treeline, shading his eyes.

Down the end of the garage Dean shuts the hood of the Impala and ambles down, wiping his hands on his pants, stopping at Sam's door as Sam pops the glove compartment and grabs Ruby's knife. Standing, Sam raises an eyebrow at Dean and Dean apes him, mystified.

“Piss off, Crowley. You're bringing down the property value,” Dean yells. Thirty feet away Crowley gives off testing the wards, evidently embarrassed to be playing mime. He clears his throat and adjusts his jacket again.

“Hello, boys.”

God, Sam hates that voice. 

“What's after you now?” Sam calls, and Crowley puts his hands in his pockets, tries to look insouciant.

“Abbadon, that bitch from Hell, has managed to get a Sicarius on my tail.”

Dean darts him a glance and Sam shakes his head. Never heard of a Sicarius, but if his Latin is right it's not looking good. He scans the treeline himself, the shadows between.

“So you thought you'd lead it here?”

“I thought I'd give you the chance to add Pluto's pet assassin to your trophy room. After all, cutting the heads off things is more your thing than mine.”

“You know, I promised you I would kill you next time I saw you,” Dean chides, taking a step forward.

“Hey!” Crowley holds up his hands, darts his eyes to Sam. “You wanna get your little angel friends? I'll scratch your back, you scratch mine.”

Sam looks him up and down. He still has dust on his pants. His hair is a mess.

“How exactly do you think you can help us?”

“I'm still the King of Hell, you know. I hear things.”

“About?”

“Let me in--”

“Come on, Sammy,” Dean says, turning. “You need a hand unloading the car?”

“About a weapon,” Crowley calls, loud and rough, anger pushing through his tone, “that can kill anything, angel or demon. In the right hands of course.”

Sam remembers when Ruby came to him with similar promises. He remembers the colt, and Lucifer. He looks at Dean, eyebrow raised, and Dean nods.

“Nah,” says Sam, and tosses Dean the knife.

“We do pretty well with what we have,” Dean says, and waves the knife at Crowley, stepping towards him. Crowley's face plunges and he spits, sharp and nasty.

“What are you even for, Dean?” Dean falters, and Crowley presses into the invisible barrier, snarling. “Moose I get, he's practically the Antichrist. But the Antichrist's babysitter? His gofer? It's pathetic.” 

Dean nods consideringly, smiles and flips the knife, grabs it by the blade and sends like a whipcrack towards Crowley's chest. Crowley knocks it out of the air with an easy swipe of his finger and it clatters into a corner of the garage.

“I'm sorry, did I hit a nerve?” He says, hand over his mouth. There was a time when Sam could have killed him just by thinking about it, erased his smarm and lies from the world.

“You're not getting in, Crowley,” he grits out. “You wanna hang on the porch until that thing shows up for you, be our guest.” He bangs on the button that closes the garage door, and it crunches across, and they are treated to the sight of him trying to push his way through, futilely, as the gap closes.

“Well, he's not gonna try that again,” Dean says, flippant, as the lock groans into place, but when Sam opens his mouth Dean points a finger at him and says _no_ , fierce and low. Sam turns to watch him go, watches him lift the hood of the Imapala again and lean in, and the words crowd and knot painfully in his throat; Dean must know, he has to know, Sam's whole life has been an ode to his miracle brother, the lives he's saved and his stupid jokes, his strength. If Dean is pointless, then Sam got there before him.

::

Sicariuses are kinda badass, it turns out. If Abbadon has control over them they might be in trouble. He starts making a list of texts to cross-reference. Maybe he ought to call Garth, too, and maybe take another look at the lay of the land outside, set up some traps. One legend out of 300AD indicates a vulnerability to olive, although he can't figure out yet if that's any olive or one of those thousand-year-old Greek jobs. If it's the latter, they're screwed.

“Sam, why is Jody texting me to ask if you're alive?”

Sam jumps. He hadn't heard Dean come up the library stairs. He's in the zone, and he doesn't want to have to deal with Dean's accusatory tone or his own beeping phone.

“She hooked me up with the doc,” he says, and scratches at his chest. It doesn't hurt anymore, but the scar is still a raised ridge and his right side is still weaker doing pushups and chin-ups. “Guess I forgot to tell her I'm okay. Tell her I'll call her later.”

“Tell her yourself,” Dean grouches, but he's typing. “So you got Jody mothering you now, huh?”

“I don't need a fucking mother, Dean,” Sam says, hand tightening around his pen, and Dean throws his hands up.

“All right, all right, Touchy McFeelerson. Jeez.” He puts his phone back in his pocket and saunters around the table and Sam's irritation is swept away like dust, watching his brother look at things he's seen before a hundred times, the bookshelves, the swords; scratching his thumbnail over the pattern inlaid in the tabletop. He clears his throat. “How's she doing?”

“Good. Got a boyfriend. Misses Bobby. You coulda gone to see her. Seeing as you were in town.”

Dean glances at him, corners of his mouth turning down.

“I wasn't in any state, Sam.”

“Neither was I.”

Dean picks at the studs upholstering the chairs.

“What did you drive, the wagon?”

Sam nods.

“Well congratulations, your transformation into soccer mom is finally complete,” Dean says, and Sam half bows in ironic acknowledgement, and the next day when he heads out to check the mail drop he can tell immediately that she's running sweeter than before: Dean's been in her guts, he realises, smoothing out her flaws, reaching in, his hands neat and sure. The picture leaves Sam so breathless with gratitude and insistent callous arousal that he has to pull over and take care of it hard and fast with the feeling of Dean's fingers pressing down his tongue, tracing his abs severe and stupefyingly real, rewriting him, leaving him bereft when he opens his eyes and is alone under the blank white sky.

::

They make silver bullets together in the kitchen, standing side by side over the bench. It's uncomfortable. The oxy torch is the loudest thing Sam has heard in weeks, battering his ears, and they need to get a new crucible. This one is better suited to pilfered silver spoons, and just one silver disc nearly overflows it.

Dean is careful as he pours, his hands steady. Sam's tongue is glued to the roof of his mouth. It's hot, metal bench and tiles reflecting the heat back at them and they are sweating. Dean has stripped down to his t-shirt, and Sam can smell him, closer than he's been in forever and he grabs the mould as soon as it's cool enough, takes it to the table and sets it on the wood block.

He clears the table, keeping his eyes on his hands, setting out the polishing gear piece by piece, hovering his palm over the mould to see if it's cooling. He shifts the box of silver to the floor, overfull and too heavy, really, but there's not exactly anyone else to blame for that. 

Dean hisses and Sam looks up to see him snatch his fingers away from the crucible, stand and head to the sink, stick his fingers under a slow flow of cold water. He is leaning, a leg cocked, staring down at his fingers, profile to Sam, and as Sam watches he bites his lip, dragging his teeth over the bottom one.

Sam swallows, heart pounding, and Dean blinks in slow motion, and stays in unreadable profile, and bites his lip again, and then three hours later he blows Sam in the library, with the lights on, in front of God and the books and his own hollow intentions. He sinks into his chair as Dean leans over him, bracing his hands on the arm rests. The place is huge, cavernous, but Dean speaks in a whisper.

“What do you want, Sam?”

Sam gapes at him, barely able to process. He wants too many things. He wants just the one.

“What do _you _want?” He says, shredded.__

Something flickers in Dean's eyes, in the deep, and down he goes, hands on the inside of Sam's knees pushing his legs apart, a fluid easy motion that opens Sam up and ruins him for the rest of his life, and he tips his head back, hides his face in the crook of his elbow, starburst across the back of his eyelids. This, for some reason _this_ is what he has been fighting, Dean's hands on him, his unholy mouth, his tongue dragging up the length of Sam's dick.

He reaches for Dean's shoulder; touches his head, hesitantly, and then hooks his fingers into Dean's hair and Dean _moans_ at that: Dean likes it and he holds tighter, fingers curved around the familiar lines of his skull. His arm moves, up and down with Dean's motion, and he can't look, all he can do is take it until he comes, folding over his brother, who swallows most of it and catches the rest in his hand. They fit together perfectly, like a child's puzzle. His thumb rests on Dean's cheek. Dean is breathing hard. Sam has never had anyone like this. 

He tilts Dean's head up from his lap and Dean surges up and kisses him hard enough to mash their lips against their teeth. Dean's hot mouth and the strange taste of semen as Sam licks in, and he gets a hand at Dean's hip and another at his back and picks him up, twists, and lays him out on the table. 

“Holy shit,” Dean gasps, flailing, and Sam thrills and grins and sets a hand to Dean's chest, holding him down and flicking open his fly as Dean hooks his legs around him, pulling him in. He gets a hand around Sam's wrist where it bends on his chest and locks his eyes on Sam's, dark and guarded, even as his boot heels dig into the back of Sam's thighs. Sam flexes his wrist in Dean's grip and leans forward. Dean licks his lips, still wet and abused and his dick twitches at the memory.

“You know what I want,” Sam growls. “Give it to me,” and Dean nearly arches off the table as Sam touches him. 

He brings Dean off and watches him as it happens, the catch in his breath, the soft grunt, known to him through the years from the bed over, from behind walls and doors and now in front of him, for him, in waves over Dean's face as Dean frowns and gasps open-mouthed, glow of the lamps on his skin, teeth gleaming, shadows sparking out in laugh lines from the corners of his eyes, so finely drawn, so much a part of his world it makes Sam's heart stop.

He showers afterwards. Dean doesn't join him, had waved him away, still dazed, sitting on the edge of the table, fingers clinging to the edge. Sam had been reluctant to leave, afraid, always afraid now that any look at Dean might be his last, and reluctant to stay, to give him the chance to speak when he could say anything at all, when he could end them with a word. Dean was staring at the floor, chest heaving like he'd never catch his breath again, and his thoughts were a mystery.

In the mirror he's flushed from the heat of the water. His lips still look swollen through the fog. He swipes his hand over the glass and he's still there, and he looks just the same, as hopeless ever.

::

He finds it in the first archive room, right under their noses.

They are finishing up digitising the card catalogue one afternoon, sitting cross-legged in the archive room with Dean next to him reading out entry by entry, tossing each card into a small box in the middle of the room with a flick of his wrist. His accuracy is not particularly improving, cards like snowfall, blue ink curling. He is nuts if he thinks Sam is going to clean it up.

“That was the most boring thing you've ever made me do,” Dean groans, dramatically frisbee-ing the last card into the corner. “And I chaperoned your junior prom, if you remember.”

“You didn't chaperone it,” Sam says, cricking his neck. “You lurked in the shadows waiting for my English teacher to murder us all by witchcraft.”

“Which she never did.”

“Because she wasn't a witch.”

“Lucky for her.”

Sam takes a swig from his water bottle to clear the dust out of his mouth and saves his work, shuts the laptop. 

“And I never made you do it. I never even wanted to go, you know.”

Dean cuts him a glance.

“Yeah, I know,” he says gruffly, and shrugs. “God knows you complained enough.”

Sam puts a hand on his shoulder and pushes himself to his feet. He cracks his back, surveying the room, shelf after shelf of box upon box, some with copperplate plaques indicating their callsign, others with numbers and letters scrawled in what he guesses is charcoal. At some point they are going to have to see if all the locations he just copied are correct, and if they can be improved upon. At some point they are going to have to go through the filing cabinets and check every document and book and figure out what was never catalogued in the first place. At some point they are going to have to integrate Bobby's collection. 

Dean digs in a crate, making faces, disgust and curiosity warring. He hauls on something and his hand emerges clutching a chalice, silver with garnets circling the rim, dim and bloody in the light. His eyes widen, and he holds it up and turns it in his hands reverently, delighted. Sam can see him run the line in his head: _he chose poorly._

He is too much to bear. Sam has to turn away, distracts himself with a book on a shelf next to him, and he flips a page the length of his arm and there it is, in acute Latin geometry: a summoning spell, faded into the paper. He's never seen anything like it. 

He grabs a pen and starts scribbling a list of supplies on the back of a card. Dean appears, peering over his shoulder.

“Bone of a saint? Powdered aquamarine? What the hell, Sam?”

“Gadreel,” Sam says, grim. His eye sticks on one ingredient in particular.

“Eye of a black cat? This is some witchy shit,” Dean says, frowning, but Sam has already pulled out his phone. 

“Cas, that last day. The syringe. Did you keep it?”

“Grace is not a banana peel, Sam. I couldn't just discard it.”

Sam flicks his eyes up. Dean is watching him, arms folded, and Sam is hit by a brief crisis of loss, the outside world intruding finally, like a debt come due.

He takes a deep breath.

“I've found a summoning ritual.”

Cas is there within the hour, plastic Costco bag bulging, and looks over the ritual carefully. It's old, he tells them, and strange, but it might work. Dean is trying not to listen, poking through his bag, unravelling a scabby piece of velvet to reveal yellowing finger bone.

“Saint Anthony,” Cas says, proudly, and Dean blanches and heads to the liquor cabinet. 

“Very cute,” Sam grins. 

“Did Sam show you his treasure chest?” Cas asks, and Dean, halfway through his drink, splutters and hacks.

“Uh, shall we take this stuff to the dungeon?” Sam says, and Cas shakes his head.

“No, neutral ground. Here will seem like a threat.”

Sam frowns. 

“Yeah,” says Dean, slowly. “Because threats are for people that can't deliver, right?” But Cas presses his lips together impatiently and shakes his head.

“You know he is Metatron's second-in-command. We need him. And we are dying in droves, Dean. I must end this with no more bloodshed.” 

“You wanna meet him with the peace pipe in your hand?”

“No, but Dean. Sam.” Cas looks back and forth between them. “You must not kill him.”

Sam raises his eyebrows. He reserves the right to do whatever the hell he wants to, and he can see Dean thinking the same thing. Dean will go after Gadreel like he's absolution, the blood of the lamb. 

He will be disappointed, Sam thinks, sagging with it. He sits down, knees weak.

“What will you do with him, Cas?”

“We need him to turn against Metatron,” Cas says, and Dean looks between them, incredulous.

“No. No way. He's a liar and a son of a bitch. I owe Kevin his head. Sam, come on, I know you want to put a bullet in him as much as I do.”

“And if we need to we will,” says Sam, reluctantly. “But Cas is right. Metatron is the goal.”

“I woulda thought you of all people would be on my side, here,” Dean hisses and Sam glares at him. It's pointless. He already knows this will not go Dean's way. Gadreel will survive, and if they ever see Kevin again he will have every right to call them to account, and Sam with have nothing but regrets and apologies for him, inadequate. Maybe they owe him blood, maybe they don't. Maybe what they really owe him – Kevin, Amelia, Benny, all of them – is the end of it, the end of them.

::

Dean is silent and steaming in the car, _Master of Puppets_ blaring, and underneath the drums Sam notices something off about the car, something different, her sound even lower than usual.

“Did you change the engine?”

Dean shrugs, eyes on the road. Sam's gaze falls to the dash.

“Is that an _iPod_ jack?” He asks, startled, and a wince drops the corner of Dean's mouth. “Wow, skipped the CDs and went straight to the iPod, I'm proud of you man. When did you do this?”

“After, ah.” Dean swallows. “I kinda crashed her a little bit.”

“What?” He yelps. “When? How bad was it?” Dean flaps his hand at him. 

“I was dumb, I was drunk, I hit a tree, it's no biggie.”

Sam stares at him, mind racing, his eyes going to the telling scar on his forehead. That night Dean called him. He'd lay money on it. Sam had turned over warm in his bed, and his brother had enacted some travesty out on the road alone, some tree out there bearing the mark of Dean Winchester. How did he manage? Who helped him with the car?

His stomach lurches and he turns to look out at the roadside, blurring past. He's glad he wasn't there. He would have killed Dean himself.

“It wasn't that bad, Sam,” Dean says, voice soft, and Sam flicks a glance at him, tries to smile. His cheeks are resistant.

“Dad woulda had your ass.”

“Yeah, well, he's not here.”

“No, he's not,” Sam says, and it feels like he's planting a flag.

::

They choose an old welding yard on the outskirts of Denver for their trap, bars and rust looming dangerously. Once summoned Gadreel is easy enough to restrain. Not much chance to learn the tricks of the trade in his cell, Sam imagines, looking down at him as he pulls against his ties. He's a stranger. Sam can barely recall the touch of his presence, his righteous certitude. He had felt settled, rested; and his hand had been on Kevin and burned him out.

Dean stands between them like he can pretend Sam is not here at all. They have had Gadreel an hour now, and Dean has tried to break his hand on the angel's face twice before Cas pushed him aside. 

“Metatron is insane,” Cas says. “You must see that. Why do you assist him?”

Gadreel tests the strength of the rope again, a constant press and pull, raising red welts on his vessel's skin.

“Our people must return home. _You_ should know this.”

“Our people,” Cas says, “have been thinking this way too long. We cannot kill our way to Heaven, Gadreel.”

Gadreel looks away.

“I am needed,” he insists.

“I need a belt to hold up my pants,” Dean snaps. “Doesn't mean I'm gonna marry it.”

Gadreel squints at him in incomprehension. Sam is so tired of it. It's not like it used to be, with Zacariah, Uriel, their malevolent purpose. Gadreel reminds Sam of a wood etching, all bold lines and new angles, white space between them. 

“You think it will make up for what you've done?” He asks, and Gadreel looks at him coldly.

“I have _served_ my time. You have no idea what it's like to be be caged.” 

“You know I know,” Sam says, harsh.

“Then we are brothers, you and I,” Gadreel says, straining forward against his bonds, eyes searching Sam's. The certitude in there is mesmerising, and Sam turns away, throat working. Kevin, he reminds himself. Abner. They are nothing alike where it counts. 

“Metatron will lose,” Cas says. “You will die in this war, or be imprisoned again at the end of it.”

“Your threats are worthless,” Gadreel sneers, and settles back in the chair, stills. It's a lie. His wrists are proof enough of that. Sam can see the panic in his eyes. He can feel it, the terror of the bars, the suffocating walls. 

He looks over at Dean and holds his hand out for the blade, scrapes at the trap with his foot. 

“Sam,” Dean warns, and Sam silences him with a gesture, cuts Gadreel's bonds and points the blade at his heart as he stands, slowly, watchfully.

“You think redemption will free you?” He says, and sees a flicker of recognition in Gadreel's eyes. “You really think Metatron cares? Even if he wins, you will stay his slave, or you will be back in the cell.”

He looks at Cas, and Cas hesitates. Sam holds his gaze, steady, until he nods, sharp and sure. 

He drops the blade and Gadreel disappears, Cas a second behind him, and like a chain has snapped Dean is on him, shoving him hard, sending him reeling.

“What the fuck did you do,” he yells, and Sam grapples to get hold of him, to keep his feet.

“Dean, listen,” he pleads. “It wouldn't have worked.”

“So what, we're all turning our swords into ploughshares, is that it?”

“No, but these angels, I know them.” He lets go of Dean's jacket, steps away. “This was our only play, trust me.”

“Trust him, he says,” Dean mutters, and runs his hand over his face, stares down at the trap, scuffed red lines on the concrete. He glances at Sam. “You can't tell me ganking him wouldn't be satisfying.”

“Nope, can't argue that,” he says, and Dean flashes him a quick white grin, and they clean up the most obvious signs of their presence and head back to the car.

::

They take a long low pendulum swing through Amarillo on the way back, a hunt Sam's had on the backburner after his alerts picked up a rugaru making itself felt on the outskirts of town. Sam sleeps first, dead to the world until they break for lunch, cramming down awful gas station hot dogs, and then Sam takes them through the rest of the afternoon. He's got the music down to a hum so Dean can sleep, barely audible over the road noise and the engine.

He looks over. Dean's head is pillowed on a ratty old hoodie; he'll have creases on his face when he wakes, and will deny their existence, and Sam will not be able to contain his amusement. The sun sets behind Dean's shoulder, gilding his hair, casting his face into soft grey shadow, and Sam can barely look away from him, called to this moment like deja vu, like home.

They hit the city late and someone has beaten them to it. She looks familiar and watching her step down the police station hall steps, shrugging into her jacket, he remembers her with shorter hair, years upon years ago, Dean's year. Tamara. 

“Is that--”

“Yeah.” 

“Should we just leave her to it?”

Dean makes a considering face, hands up, weighing.

“Get a burger, deal with rugaru guts.” 

Sam has just driven eight hours for this hunt and he couldn't care less, grinning and guiding him back to a diner that caught his eye a few streets over, brightly-lit and making all sorts of promises about bacon; liquor store next door, just Dean's kind of place. They take their time over dinner as the late-night crowd clears out, and Sam heads next door for some beer. He comes back to find Dean charming a slice of banana caramel pie and a motel recommendation out of the waitress.

Tamara's waiting for them as they exit, stepping out of the shadows at the back of the parking lot where they stashed the Impala. She has a shotgun levelled at Sam's gut. He raises his hands but can't help the smile that comes to his face. She doesn't smile back.

“Why are you watching me?”

“Hey, Tamara.” She looks well. He wishes she weren't still on her own. “It's good to see you.”

“I asked you a question.”

“We're not watching you,” Dean says, and shoots his hands up when she swings the gun around him. “We just caught the same lead. But we're heading out.”

“I'd say so,” she says.

Dean fishes his keys out carefully, under her eye and under the gun. Her husband had been called Isaac, Sam remembers. They'd had their own story. He'd barely touched it. 

The gun shifts to the side a fraction. She looks torn.

“You want a job, try Milton Illinois. Demons are still your line, right?”

“Thanks.” Sam says. “Hey, call us sometime,” which must be a mistake as she raises the gun again, stepping backwards to her own car. Leaving, she gives them a wide berth, curling her lip at Dean's ironic salute goodbye.

“You're an asshole,” Sam says.

“Call us sometime,” Dean grouses, settling in the driver's seat. He turns the car on as Sam fits the beer in the rear footwell and the car shudders and grumbles to life, vibrating through him. “She doesn't even have your number, you dork. Not to mention she's afraid of you.”

“They're afraid of _you_. They hate me.”

“They should be begging you,” Dean says, adjusting the rearview mirror, the steering column. “You're the best there's ever been.” Dean believes it too, although Sam can tell Dean is not counting himself as one of those against whom Sam is measured. He reaches for the door handle and misses when Dean lifts his foot and inches the car forward; does it again a second later as Sam reaches again, ducks his head to catch Sam's eye through the window, smirks and Sam rolls his eyes, ends the game as he always has, snaps a hand out to swing the door open, putting it in the path of a trash can, forcing Dean to brake.

“You think you're so goddamn funny,” he says, sliding into his seat.

“I don't think I'm funny, I know it.”

“Keep telling yourself that,” Sam says, and winds down the window as they peel out onto the road.

::

Another day's drive and they stop for food and drink and a quick hustle at a bar in Mankato, and it's far too close to the bunker but their efforts are half-hearted and they barely make enough for beer and gas so it's not a true salting of the earth, Sam tells himself. Not enough here for someone to track them back, although in the face of federal or hunter questioning Dean would surely blaze in bystander memory, hustler or not.

He plays it relatively straight, not needing Sam to feed anything in except the occasional sawbuck and Sam leans, beer in hand against the wall, and watches him like everyone else, the sure angles of his arms and back, his offensively cocky grin. He breaks the sixth game, the final it turns out, scatters the balls, potting one and leaving the eight motionless and his eyes flick up and lock to Sam like a magnet. Sam raises his beer in acknowledgement and Dean straightens and grins at his opposer, and finishes him.

And then Dean takes him back to the bunker and fucks him in his bed, in Sam's own bed, on his knees and elbows, panting in great humid gasps, grinding his forehead into the mattress. He has the sheets in his fists and he's so hard he doesn't know how his heart has the blood to beat so calamitously, like being socked in the chest again and again.

Dean is above him, one hand hooked into his hipbone, the other roving up Sam's spine, kneading around his shoulders, pushing up his neck into his hair. He tugs, giving Sam something to brace against, sharp and sweetly painful. Sam bends his head away and Dean lets him go, brings his hand back down along Sam's side, around to his stomach, and then down, too far down, skipping Sam's dick in favour of his hip, his thigh. 

Sam groans, some sound he's never heard himself make before and he hears Dean's breath catch. His forehead hits between Sam's shoulder blades.

“Okay?” he breathes, hot on Sam's skin.

“Yeah, yeah,” Sam gasps, but really. Who the fuck knows. Dean is in him. Sam has never done this before, and Dean is impossibly huge, and he moves in an implacable smooth rhythm that Sam would never have had the control for. It's been going on for forever, fever burn in the pit of his stomach, spiralling out crazily, tingling in his fingers and toes like nerve damage. It's too quiet, just the sound of them, their breathing, their wet skin. The bed creaks in time, regular as clockwork, and he is out of his mind, and he cannot move. 

“Dean, please,” he rasps, voice like death, and Dean swears something that sounds like Sam's name and Sam groans and pushes back into him. Dean's rhythm falters. Sam grins, feral and secret, his own sweat salting his lips, and pushes back again, holds tight, and Dean calls him a fucker and lifts his pace or shifts his angle, Sam doesn't know but it whites him out, writes him off completely as Dean puts his blessed hand on Sam's dick and pulls him through it, as his biceps and thighs tremble, eyes closed so tight it hurts, the whole edifice threatening to tumble down.

When he opens his eyes Dean's wrist is four inches away, tendons standing out. Sam turns his head and bites at it, pushes his tongue between Dean's fingers, soft rasp of the sheets and salt and grease of lube in his mouth and Dean curses again in shock. Sam feels him come, hips stuttering, hand slipping and clutching across his ribs, back in his hair. His weight lands on Sam, heavy and insistently present, and Sam locks his shoulders and bears it.

::

He wakes with a body next to him. It is dark, the hall light showing dim under the door. Dean had shut it, getting up long-legged and naked, had cleaned them down and turned off the lamp and touched Sam's face just as Sam drifted off, thumb brushing ghostlike over his cheek.

Last time he woke next to someone it was to pull his arm back from her and leave, thirteen-hour drive through the dawn to his Lazarus brother. It's been too long, and he's so thankful his throat closes over and his eyes sting. Dean's forearm is slung over his side; his knee nudges Sam's thigh. He is warm and solid as ballast.

He could do this again. He could get used to this. He could wake in Dean's bed some mornings, maybe, remembered by his mattress, and listen to him breathe, and feel him there, and know that they exist, and know himself to be alive and not alone in the world, amid monsters and angels, friends and civilians.

Sam spends a lot of time reading lore. He thinks often of Chuck's books, all his research over the years presented there, readable, useable even, to the extent that a non-hunter could ever find goofer dust. It's the only thing about the Books of Winchester that pleases him.

The Lore of Winchester has forever been a closed circle, a snake eating its tail, but here under his brother's arm he wonders for the first time if it really is so inevitable, if the borders of his life must always be the bars of a cage, the bricks of a battlement. Maybe he can use his hands, and his will, dismantle and reforge and make them foundations instead. 

“Fucking shut up,” Dean mumbles, creaky with sleep. “I can hear you thinking from here.”

Sam smiles despite himself, and closes his eyes.

 

The end.

  


**Author's Note:**

> Feedback/concrit welcome.
> 
>  
> 
> [Rebloggable tumblr link for those so inclined.](http://nigeltde-fic.tumblr.com/post/131345143291/the-partisan-38638-words-by-nigeltde-chapters)


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